Archive of Our Own

Nate looks at the odometer—2,576 miles traveled from Los Angeles—nearly two days of straight driving, only to get pulled over a mile from his destination. The Starbucks drive-in coffee, the A/C, and an unbroken soundtrack of the Red Hot Chili Peppers had been the only thing keeping him from drifting off into a ditch starting around mile 1800.

He can see the deputy climbing purposefully out of his cruiser in his rearview mirror. It’s early, not yet eight and already nearly 90 degrees out, but the deputy moves smoothly through the crushing heat. Nate remains frozen, too burdened by the past few days’ excess of baggage to quite believe his misfortune. He finally reaches over to the glove box to fumble out the rental’s registration with a sigh.

He rolls the window down when the deputy gets close and says a weary “I’m sorry, officer, was I doing something wrong?”

The deputy has got a familiar look about him, but it’s been a long time since Nate’s been back to godforsaken Twelve Oaks and he can’t quite place him. Though he does hope that looking sufficiently chagrinned will let him off with a warning so he can check into a hotel and hit the sack that much faster.

“You were going fifteen miles faster than the posted limit. Now I know—Nate?” the deputy asks, ducking closer to get a better look at him. He swoops in so quickly it almost makes him shrink from the window. The deputy’s face splits with a grin, “Holy hell, Nate Fick! It’s been what, ten years?”

Nate squints at him, taking in the fresh guileless face. “Walt?”

“Yessir, in the flesh!”

“Walt, what are you doing in uniform? I thought you were going to Memphis to start a band!”

“Well, I still got the band, we play on Thursdays at Meena’s, but a man’s gotta make a dime somehow, I got me a fiancé now,” he smiles and shrugs. “But what about you, looking all citified and driving a Lexus! I can’t believe you’re back, the way your grandmother talks—I thought you’d gone as far away from this place as you could get. She’s been telling the whole town you weren’t like to be back for Emma Rose’s funeral.”

“The car’s not mine,” Nate says quickly and clears his throat, oddly abashed by his own excuse. “And I am, back for Emma Rose’s funeral, that is.”

“Well,” Walt says, straightening up next to the car, like the awkwardness of the situation is only just dawning on him, “My condolences. She was a real nice lady and the town will surely miss her shop.”

“Yeah,” Nate says, “Listen, Walt, I’m about two steps away from collapsing. You think you could just write me the ticket and I’ll be on my way?”

“Are you kidding? I ain’t gonna write you a ticket, you’re Twelve Oaks royalty, even if you are driving that dandified pile of parts,” he says with a decisive nod at the Lexus. “You’ll be staying up at the House of course.”

“Actually, I took a room at the Oddfellow,” Nate says, adding at Walt’s blank look, “I just needed some space. I brought my work with me.”

“Oh, oh of course,” Walt blinks, “I’ll see you on your way then. And drive safe now, you hear?”

Nate can’t do more than grimace, but Walt accepts it for a smile and taps the top of the car peremptorily before striding off to his cruiser. Nate sinks back into his seat, registration clutched in his hand. He is not ready to be back here. Maybe he never will be.

*

Nate left town at eighteen with little more than the thousand dollars in cash Aunt Emma had given him when she’d caught him with the greyhound ticket and his track team duffle packed as full as it would go. He’d made his way inexorably west ever since, first with a year slinging drinks in St. Louis and an ID that said he was 23. He’d got out of there as fast as he could by going to Northwestern, grinding out his BA in three years, and then jumping on to Senator McKaskill’s campaign in Los Angeles, which took him to now.

As Walt had so aptly stated, nobody had ever expected him to come back, least of all himself. He’d kept in touch with Aunt Emma, exchanging longhand letters until he finally convinced her to switch to email, and he’d spoken to his sisters fairly regularly over the years. He hadn’t minded the radio silence with the rest of his family in the slightest, if he could’ve avoided even thinking about them, that would’ve been ideal.

When he drops off his hastily packed bag at the Oddfellow and Maureen Wilkes gives him the key, she tells him, “My, we have missed you.”

Nate holds her gaze for slightly too long, unsure why those words unsettle him so much. Is it possible that they don’t know? He supposes his family would’ve preferred to erase the shame of his sexual deviancy rather than be open about it. If Maureen Wilkes knows, she’s sure putting a brave face on it.

*

He stops in at the Sweetwater for coffee and isn’t surprised in the slightest when Mabel, the leather-faced proprietress of indeterminate age who’ll probably outlast them all, doesn’t recognize him. When she knew him he wore a near unbroken uniform of slacks and polo shirts from Brooks Brothers. He bought his first pair of jeans for ten dollars at a T.J. Maxx in St. Louis. He never even noticed how much he looked like a J. Crew catalogue until he was doing his own shopping and couldn’t afford it.

“What can I get you, handsome?” Mabel asks him, wiping down the counter.

“Just a coffee, black,” he says. He’ll need some fortification before heading over to the House.

“You from Atlanta?” She asks as she fills his mug. No doubt trying to parse out why his vowels aren’t as long as a bus and he’s pronouncing all his consonants.

“No, ma’am,” he says, holding in a sigh and wishing he could leave it at that, but the way news spreads in this town, it’ll be all over the place that the Fick boy stopped at the Sweetwater and didn’t say hello. “It’s me, Mabel, Nathaniel Fick.”

She blinks at him, pulls the glasses that hang by a chain around her neck up to her eyes, and shakes her head. “Good lord, boy, you look like a Yankee.”

The smile he gives her is surprisingly unforced. “Always to the point, Mabel.”

“Well, where are you keeping yourself? Your grandmother don’t tell us much ever since you left.” She runs her eyes over him like he’s only the exoskeleton for the child she once knew.

Nate doesn’t doubt it. Aunt Emma hadn’t written very often about the formidable Fick matriarch in the intervening years—to spare his feelings, most likely—but the silence said more than any form of news would.

He used to think nothing could bring him back here; obviously he wasn’t thinking big picture, probably because he couldn’t even contemplate Aunt Emma’s death. “I’ve been out and about, but,” he says, making sure to trim the dismissal with a compliment, “I’ve sure missed Sweetwater’s breakfast. Nobody makes pancakes like you.”

“Oh, you!” She says and flicks a dishrag at him. “Always did have a sweet tongue in your head—just like your daddy.”

It takes everything he has to hold onto the derisive snort he wants to make at that offhand comment. He certainly hadn’t returned for that funeral, even though his sister had filled his voicemail box up with requests for him to come. Mabel’s face takes on an embarrassed cast, like she’s only just remembering his conspicuous absence on that occasion. But difficult situations are his forte, and that’s not about to change just because he’s back in his own personal hell. He smiles brightly at her and takes a long swallow from his mug. It wouldn’t do to alienate the only supplier of coffee in the entirety of Twelve Oaks.

“Well, be seeing you.” He puts a five-dollar bill on the counter that he knows she’ll consider too much, but before she can scold him, he says, “Consider it a deposit on my next cup.”

Her lips twitch like she’s trying to decide how she feels about that and then she shakes her head again. “Alright, Nate, don’t be a stranger now.”

He gives her a salute at the door and then pushes out into the sunshine.

*

If he was expecting his family to descend upon him like a hoard of Hun invaders at the first word of his return, he’s sorely disappointed. Even his drive up to the garage in the offensive Lexus doesn’t stir anybody out of the house. It looks quiet, serene—completely untouched and yet so different from his memory of it at the same time. The front door is unlocked like it always is, and after a moment’s hesitation he lets himself in.

Into a world of barely controlled chaos.

He barely has time to get out of the way before his cousin, Gracie, streaks past, chasing after a man, slinging a nine iron and shrieking like a murder of crows. Nate has to press himself back against the door to avoid being swiped. The help scurries along in their devastating wake, desperately trying to limit the destruction. He hasn’t seen her since she was nine, and yet, she’s immediately recognizable as the little girl who threw a fit at her seventh birthday party when they bought her a Little Mermaid cake rather than the far superior Beauty and the Beast cake they were all expected to know she wanted. It’s been two seconds and Nate feels ready to surrender and leave.

He pauses when he sees his mother flitting through the carnage, waving a limp hand anxiously and exhorting Gracie not to break her antique lamps. She doesn’t even notice him. Something cold and sharp invades him, sliding down his throat and pooling in his stomach, amassing into the beginnings of anger.

In fact, nobody notices him, not even when he gets shouldered out of the doorway by the sudden entrance of his cousins—Gracie’s brothers, Jack and Charlie. He notes that they’ve grown up to look like unfortunate twin bulldogs.

“Where is he?” Jack shouts, sprinting down the hall, Charlie hot on his heels.

This is too much, and yet the madness he’s come to expect in this house should’ve left him immune to whatever he might’ve found on the other side of the door. For some (clearly) deranged reason, he’d pictured walking in through the foyer to find the entire family placidly arrayed at the dining table in their tennis whites, as they were the summer night Nate decided to leave. He remembers acutely, as if his life had only just been fast-forwarded from that instant, the moment he realized he couldn’t stay. It makes him waver. His shaking hands say he’s not ready for this, but turning tail now seems like an insult to Emma.

The house plunges into abrupt quiet after the stampede of relatives, but there’s a sense of wrongness about him being in it—like he accidentally wandered into the heart of Fort Knox and is only just now realizing that he shouldn’t be there, that he never should’ve been allowed in.

The gunshot smack of the screen door slamming home startles his heart half out of his chest. Distant shouting tells him the drama has wended its way to the backyard—if a place with two tennis courts, a pool, and a neoclassical pantheon could be termed anything so pedestrian as a yard. Dear God, does he despise this place.

He draws in a deep breath and continues after them, pointedly opening and shutting the screen with a soft creak that goes unobserved, not that anything could distract the family from Gracie pursuing her boyfriend onto the tennis courts wielding the golf club like a tilting lance, her brothers not far behind. His grandmother sits on the veranda watching the performance unfold with his heavily pregnant sister, Katherine, at her shoulder.

The old lady hasn’t aged a day, like time has frozen both her and the house into some unsettling stasis while everything else continues on around them. He can see now that his mother’s jaw has softened, there are paper-thin lines around her eyes and a pinched set to her mouth he doesn’t remember.

She’s stopped at the foot of the stairs, looking woebegone. “My roses…” she says, staring at the casualties of Gracie’s golf club.

When Nate looks back at the tennis courts, Gracie has jumped atop her boyfriend, intruder, male companion—Nate can only wonder, pummeling him while trying to hang around his neck. The poor guy staggers under her weight as he tries to protect himself from her blows, provoking a snort from his grandmother. She doesn’t say anything, merely propping her chin in her fist on the arm of her chair, but Nate can see what’s going through her mind like a neon sign hung for all to see: worthless.

“Goddamn it, mother, why are you just sitting there?” His Uncle Beau shouts, blowing right by him, to separate his children from Gracie’s poor battered boyfriend.

“I called the police,” his grandmother says, drily. “That girl never did have the sense God gave an ant. Honestly, Andy Greer?”

“Oh Gramma, you didn’t,” Katherine says, turning horrified eyes upon her.

Police sirens echo over the property right on cue. Twelve Oaks is too small to have their own police department, relying instead on the county sheriff for its few complaints. A few moments later and a deputy comes bursting around the house, long legs eating up dirt like a panther, Walt hot on his heels and nowhere near as purposeful.

“Hey, Nate,” Walt huffs, waving at him, as he sprints over to the tennis courts. Nate winces.

“Nate?” his grandmother, sister, and mother say in concerted surprise. They slowly turn to find him paralyzed in front of the backdoor.

“Hi,” he says, struggling not to clear his throat as they stare at him, unwavering and unnaturally silent in their regard. Nate remains still under the scrutiny, knowing how infuriating his grandmother finds a lack of reaction. Right on cue, his grandmother’s knuckles tighten on the armrest of her deck chair.

He’d be content to remain there in front of the door, but Katherine tentatively steps forward with an uncertain glance at their mother. “Nate,” she repeats, hand on her stomach, like the baby might be giving her hallucinations.

He smiles at her. “Yeah.”

She looks like she’s going to cry, but she holds it together with a quavering smile and comes in for a rib-cracking hug.

“You’re so tall!” she says when she steps back, staring up into his face in wonder. They both pretend he doesn’t notice her wiping at her eyes.

“What’s going on down here?” his younger sister, Holly, asks, appearing at the screen door. “I heard all this yelling and I thought—Nate?”

She squeals and pushes through the door. The screen hits the frame with another shudderingly loud crack. She’d get chastised if Nate’s grandmother weren’t too busy boring holes into him. Holly jumps at him when she gets close, arms tight around his neck. He hugs her back as hard as he can, meeting his grandmother’s eyes over her shoulder. Neither she nor his mother have moved an inch from their tableau. The behavior is not surprising, but the hurt he feels is. He pointedly drops his eyes from his grandmother.

Holly pulls back and socks him in the shoulder. He can tell it hurts her more than him.

“Hey!” he says, protesting for form’s sake more than anything else.

“That’s for leaving,” she says and then starts shaking out her hand, “And ow, what do you got under there? Marble cladding?”

This is apparently more than enough for his grandmother who finally says, “What, on God’s most green and bountiful earth, are you doing here?”

His sisters both look at him sheepishly, like they’ve been caught stealing dime candy from the corner store, and his mother turns and walks away, pointedly busying herself with her felled roses.

“I came back for Aunt Emma’s funeral, Gramma,” he says evenly, doing his best to ignore the nausea welling in his stomach.

Clearly this is not an answer she wishes to hear.

“You left. Abandoned us. Couldn’t even be bothered to attend your own daddy's funeral!” She pauses like she’s waiting for some sort of excuse or explanation. When none is forthcoming, she makes a dismissive noise in the back of her throat and says, “You thought you could just waltz back in, didn’t you? You thought we’d all forget, because the wonderful Nathaniel C. Fick can do no wrong. As far as I’m concerned, you can stay gone.”

“Alright,” he replies tonelessly, turning for the screen door, “I’ll see you at the service.”

“Oh no you don’t,” she says, standing up from her chair like a queen rising from her throne.

“Gramma, wait—” Holly starts.

“Is everything all right here, ma’am?” a voice interrupts from the base of the steps. Nate turns, surprised by the sudden incursion of another possible combatant. It takes him a second to recognize the person standing at the base of the stairs.

Brad Colbert, in wranglers and a sheriff’s star, stares up at them, a pleasant smile on his face. His mirrored aviators make his eyes impossible read.

He was out of control in high school—a couple years ahead of Nate and legendary with every double-x chromosome from the cheerleading squad to the Younglife prayer group. There’d even been some rumor about the art teacher and crabs and a vial of cocaine. Whether or not any of it was true, he would’ve been the last person Nate would’ve bet on as sheriff. Especially not tranquilly smiling at the celebrated Fick family like he was over to break up their domestic battles all the time.

There’s an outraged yell that makes the assembled company flinch; a reminder that they can’t pretend it’s all tea and cotillion at 110 Archer Road, Nate thinks bemusedly. Over Brad’s shoulder, Walt’s still grappling with Gracie, while Beau does his best to restrain his sons.

A palpably awkward silence descends over all of them.

“Everything’s fine, sheriff,” his grandmother says so smoothly it’s eerie. She turns her back on Brad and but keeps a missile lock on Nate while she waits for the prying eyes to leave.

“How’ve you been, Nate?” Brad asks, pointedly ignoring the hint.

“I’m fine—are you sure you should leave them unattended?” he asks, nodding at the tennis courts. Gracie has sagged into Walt’s hold, tears overtaking her, while her boyfriend looks like a cornered dog before Jack and Charlie. He can’t even imagine what he might’ve done to inspire such furor, bought the wrong earrings, showed up late to the movies.

Brad doesn’t look away from him, he simply says, “Walt can handle it.”

“Right,” Nate replies, hoping his disbelief is not as obvious as he thinks it is.

“Were you leaving? I’ll walk you to your car,” Brad says, disregarding the Fick Matriarch’s outraged glare. His bland smile resolves into a mirthful grin. “What was it, a Lexus?”

“It’s not mine,” Nate replies, unsure why exactly he’s defending himself. It’s only a stupid rental car. He sweeps one last uneasy look over his family—his grandmother standing erect and furious, his shamefaced sisters, and his purposefully indifferent mother—and turns to lead the way through the house.

Nate remains silent until they get to the other side of the house. “Thanks for the rescue,” he says quietly.

“Don’t mention it,” Brad says, tipping down his aviators with another brilliant smile. “I’ve had my share of awkward confrontations.”

“Yeah,” Nate says stupidly, hovering at the driver’s side door on the rental, unsure of what do next.

“Well, be seeing you,” Brad tells him, getting into his cruiser so he can back it up out of the driveway for Nate to pass. He pauses halfway into his seat. “And Nate?”

“Yeah?” Nate asks.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Brad tells him.

“Thank you,” Nate says, swallowing.

*

He gets a booth at the Sweetwater for dinner that night, using his work for companionship, because God knows his family is not an option. Holly had called, but then quickly told him she couldn’t get away until after the funeral before he could even ask if she’d let him treat her to dinner. He’d anticipated as much, no doubt his grandmother made it clear to anybody in the family that he was persona non grata.

He’s glad of his wireless network card, because of course the Sweetwater doesn’t have wi-fi and thankfully everybody in the office has been uploading things to the Box account they keep so that he can access everything while he’s away. Essentially he could pitch up a tent in the wilds of Georgia and keep going until his battery ran out. That is, unless something demanded his in-person presence. As the job tended to do.

He’d had to go to three different places to find a copy of the New York Times, because the Food & Drug didn’t carry it, and Aunt Emma’s bookstore was shut tight while they figured out what to do with it. He hadn’t been laboring under any illusions of how provincial this place was, but every new invented challenge is wearing his patience thin.

He’s in the middle of a low conversation on his cell with people at the office when Walt stumbles in talking loudly with another guy in an eye-popping Hawaiian print shirt. When they slide in across from Nate, he’s not exactly surprised, but he was praying Walt wouldn’t notice him or at least have the good sense from the laptop, multiple accordion files, and the legal text he’d dragged all the way over from California that he was not open for business.

“Hi Nate, you remember Ray—”

“He’s not gonna remember!” Ray interrupts.

Nate quickly makes his apologies and hangs up the phone.

Walt elbows Ray in the ribs. “You remember Ray Person?”

“I don’t know that I’ve had the pleasure,” Nate says, taking his glasses off and setting them aside. He reaches across the table to shake hands. “Nate Fick, pleased to meet you.”

Ray grins at him. “I had the biggest crush on your sister Katherine ever since I first saw her in Sunday school.”

Nate stares at him blankly and then it dawns on him. “Jesus, you’re that Ray Person.”

“In the flesh,” Ray says.

“Didn’t Kath beat you up a couple of times back in elementary school?”

“She did indeed, but nothing could dull the purity of my ardor,” He replies, ignoring Walt’s snort. He gets distracted by the textbook at Nate’s elbow. “California Family Law, eh? This text is full of crap.”

Nate stares at him, nonplussed. “You’re up on California law?”

“I got bored,” Ray shrugs. “Obviously most of my knowledge is vis a vis Georgia, but I could give you a couple of recommendations to get you started.”

“You’re a lawyer,” Nate says, unsure why the dots aren’t connecting.

“Only one in town,” Ray replies. “Just came from court, actually.”

“You…just came from court?” Nate repeats numbly. “You’re wearing uh…that.”

“Yes, and you are wearing a very boring dress shirt. I’m not sure which of us should be pointing fingers for style.”

Walt gives Nate a sheepish shrug. “Judge Sixta does keep threatening him with contempt of court, though.”

“Eh, he’s all bark,” Ray replies. “So you got any questions?”

“Pardon?”

“On family law,” Ray says slowly like he’s speaking to a very small child. “You trying to adopt someone? Word around town was—”

So it’s out then. People—at least some people—have a pretty good idea why he left. How anticlimactic. He’d always expected to be run out of town.

Walt elbows him hard in the gut and Ray shouts, “Ow, what? I know some things! Georgia is pretty good about LGBT adoption. Well, if you’re a single parent anyway. Nate, do you have a—”

Walt elbows him again with a barked, “Ray!”

Nate can’t help a laugh. “Walt, it’s fine.” He shuffles some papers around to create space on the table. “Would you like to join me for dinner?”

“Definitely!” Ray says at the same time Walt says, “Only if it’s no inconvenience."

*

The funeral is a simple church affair, the readers are lovely, the speeches are poignant—he has to give his Grandmother that much credit. Nate doesn’t speak, because he has nothing to say to these people.

The only words he has are bitter and toxic, and Aunt Emma had earned better than him lambasting their family in front of the entire town. He was pretty sure that comparing his time in Twelve Oaks to living on a noxious nuclear dumping ground wouldn’t go over well with anybody.

A girl who worked in Aunt Emma’s shop quotes Samuel Butler’s Note-Books, ‘ “To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not truly dead.”’

It’s fitting, if a bit played-out at occasions such as these. Nevertheless, he knows she would’ve appreciated it and that will have to be enough.

He sits apart from his family. The townspeople whisper about it, they are not subtle. When he walks out of the church into the sunshine, he’s surprised that so many people stop him to give him their sympathy as they pass. His sisters gesture at him to come stand with them. It gives him pause, does he go over there, or does he stand here like the odd man out that he so obviously is? The answer is painful, but clear—he wishes very much that he could bridge that gulf between him and his family, but it requires a certain mental toughness he’s not sure he has.

*

Ray wasn’t exaggerating when he said he was the only lawyer in town. Accordingly, he’s handling Emma’s estate. Calling obscenely early in the morning, he wakes Nate to meet in front of Emma’s house. Through his plodding, decaffeinated stupor, Nate had understood Emma had left him a bequest separate from the other members of the family, but asking to meet at the ass end of dawn at her house doesn’t give him any clues what exactly that is. He’s worried she’d left him the understated white Victorian she and his grandmother had been raised in. It’s a beautiful house, but he doesn’t exactly want to be saddled with property in Georgia.

It’s storming horrible, humid rain when Nate arrives in the rental, and the only cover he has is the rusty umbrella Maureen had just lying around at the inn. Standing safely under a tent-like apparatus, Ray watches him struggle out of the car. By the time Nate makes it to the porch, he’s well soaked and his hair keeps dripping water into his eyes.

“What’s this about?” he asks Ray, watching him jigger and fiddle with the lock.

“Just a few odds and ends,” Ray says, still yanking at the doorknob. “This motherfucking stupid lock!”

Nate clears his throat and reaches across, turning the key the opposite way. The door pops open with a soft snick, revealing the eerily quiet interior. It smells like his grandmother’s perfume, the telltale sign she’s been here to rearrange everything. The smell makes his stomach churn and he immediately walks over to the temperature control unit just inside the door to turn on the A/C. It’s been upgraded since he was gone, but he can see by her temperature defaults that she was still cooling her house all the way to 64 degrees in the summer.

“Are you okay?” Ray asks him, strangely and unexpectedly delicate.

Nate takes a deep breath. “Yes, yes, I’m fine.”

Thankfully disregarding Nate’s tension, Ray leads him to the rear of the house. “She left you most of the furniture. There are a couple of godawful pieces from the Arts & Crafts movement that are worth something. We had to get this snotty tea-drinking butler type down from Sotheby’s to appraise them,” he trails off, clearly mystified why anybody would want the nearly two hundred year old pieces.

He laughs. “I imagine she wants me to sell them. My grandmother always guilted her into keeping them, but since I’m Enemy of the Fick State, it’s not like I can get into worse trouble for offloading some of it.”

Ray blinks at him.

It has always been difficult to explain to people how deep the dysfunction of their inimitable clan runs, that something as inconsequential as furniture can carry an entire history of combat. The old pre-Civil War bureau à gradin that his aunt had used so lovingly had been purchased in a junk shop in Charlotte, but the chunky armoires and bookcases that squatted ungainly and cumbersome in the airy house Emma had inherited from their parents had been imported from England. His grandmother always said they had a “story” worth telling.

There’s a grocery list sitting on it in his Aunt’s rounded hand—the ingredients for her banana kiwi pie. “Sugar free,” she’d always been so proud of saying whenever she set a piece down in front of him, the fruit didn’t count being fruit and all.

Nate clears his throat. “So why are we here?”

Ray picks his way past half-packed boxes of files and crates full of books for the shop— further evidence that she was here one moment, and simply gone the next.

“Ta-dah!” Ray says, using a gesture that envelopes a glass-faced bookcase and the barrel-staved M. M. Secor trunk he and his sisters used to be make-believe was a treasure chest.

Nate pauses before reaching out and opening the doors on the bookcase, peering at the rows and rows of first editions staring at back at him. Some had cracked leather and gold leaf flaking off the spines, copies she hadn’t gotten to yet. When he’d been in elementary school her house had been closer than the Big House and he used to come over after school, doing his homework while she stitched bindings back together and re-glued protective leaves. She’d gone to school to be a preservationist, but there weren’t many big libraries or personal connections in need of her services around here. She’d opened the shop after the war, but even then she’d had little to restore besides her own purchases.

“I’ll uh…let you be,” Ray tells him, cognizant of his intrusion. He presses the key into Nate’s hand and says with a falsely cheerful smile, “You can lock the evil fucking door when you leave.”

Nate gives him a smile that was more grimace in return.

The case holds nearly 75 volumes in varying states of repair. Some of them he recognizes from his childhood, others she’d obviously acquired since he’d left. He pulls a nearly flawless Nathaniel Hawthorne book out and types the title, Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret into Google on his phone. The price for the 1883 edition he has in his hand runs over $600.

“Jesus,” he whispers.

The next one he pulls out, a signed copy of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, currently sells for nearly $6,500. On and on it goes until he finds a book he remembers from when he was in grade school. The early edition of The Phantom Tollbooth is likely nowhere near as expensive as the others, probably because it was savaged by tyrannical grade-schoolers in some library before Emma picked it up and repaired it. He can recall the horrible moldering smell it had and how some of the papers had to be ironed flat to get the crunch out.

The smell is still there—it hits him full in the face when he opens the book. There’s an inscription on the flyleaf dated 1994 in blue ballpoint, he could’ve only been ten.

“Dear Nate,

You already had a copy of this book when I brought this back from the family trip to Virginia, as you were fond of telling me. You used to read it on the couch upside down, your little legs propped up against the back and your head hanging over the edge. Of course, I didn’t tell you then that that was why I chose it and paid far too much for it considering the abysmal state it was in.

I never had children—I imagine someday you’ll find out why. Suffice it to say, with you in my life I have not regretted it. When I saw this book, barely held together by a thread, I said to myself I’d put it back together and give it to you when you had children of your own, to remind you what I know you already know: that family and love comes in all shapes and sizes, that it is not always blood, but the brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and even mothers and fathers you assemble for yourself that will always take the very best care of you.

The hand you’ve been dealt is a tough one to play, but I have always known you would make the very best of it. Be strong, be beautiful, be brave.

Never stop fighting.

I love you.

He closes the book with a snap, a tear hitting the cover before he can wipe it from his face.

It brings everything back—all the rage and pain and desperation. All the fear and loneliness that has kept him away from this place for so long, the deep-seated hurt that has always left him wondering what will be enough, and why he can never, never find it in anyone else. The small dark part of him who even wonders if anybody is ever going to care about him.

*

He spends the rest of the day packing up what he can easily take with him, calling auctioneers and antique dealers, and trying to figure out what’s going on with the still shut-up bookstore. It stops raining late in the evening, so he calls the one cab in town to haul the unopened steamer trunk back to his hotel room, because of course it doesn’t fit in the infernal Lexus. He’ll likely have to arrange some kind of service to pack all the rare books Emma collected over the last sixty years, because he sure as hell isn’t selling them like he plans to do with every last clunky fucking piece of furniture she left him. He highly doubts he’ll be able to throw two to three hundred year old books into the back of his rental and expect it’ll all be kosher.

After he’s taken care of that, he decides he’s not ready to face the contents of the steamer trunk and so he goes to the Sweetwater for dinner and a much-needed beer.

Brad and Walt sit in a booth at the back, just off shift if their uniforms are any indication. Walt waves at him and gestures at the seat to his right. Nate hesitates, unsure if he’s really up to company right now, before caving at the thoroughly depressing thought of getting drunk by himself while catching up on the work he brought along with him.

“Nate,” Walt says, sliding out of his booth and offering his seat up, “good to see you. I was just about to abandon Brad to get home to my wife and now I won’t be leaving him all alone.”

“The horror, the horror,” Brad says and takes a long draught of his beer. Nevertheless he has a smile for Nate as he sits down.

“You look like hell,” he says baldly after Walt leaves.

“About as good as I feel then,” Nate replies.

Brad nods in commiseration and reaches over the back of the booth to scoop an unused menu off the table behind him. He’s tall enough that he barely has to stretch to reach it and Nate is oddly, uncomfortably aware of him. Luckily, Brad doesn’t seem to notice. He tosses the menu to Nate and says, “Here, order some pancakes. I’ll buy you a beer, and you’ll be too busy dealing with heartburn to worry about whatever’s eating you.”

“Pancakes and beer?”

Brad nods at him. “That’s right, you don’t know. JT’s in the kitchen on Thursdays. Nothing’s safe from him but pancakes.” He shrugs his shoulders diffidently and flags Mabel down with a glance.

“So…um,” Nate pauses when she arrives, shooting Brad a quick look, “apparently I’m ordering pancakes?”

“You want ‘em blueberry like you had ‘em as a kid?” Mabel asks.

“Sure,” he says, unsure why he’s surprised that she remembered.

“And a Bud Light,” Brad adds, “on me, Mabel.”

“Well that’s rich, honey, since the sheriff’s money is no good here,” Mabel says with a laugh. She directs her attention back at Nate, “We only got pop-top, you okay with that?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” he says, even as he’s searching his brain for the last time he drank anything out of a can. Probably lying in the back of his friend Rick’s flatbed parked out in the abandoned lot after a football game—a Schaeffer or a PBR likely swiped from someone’s dad’s garage.

“You good?” Brad asks him and Nate realizes he’s been silent for too long.

Nate summons up a smile and a nod. “You played football, right?”

Brad takes a long gulp of his own can of Bud and looks at Nate from under his blond lashes, “Mmhm, why?”

“Just thinking,” Nate says, not bothering to explain.

“You still root for the Bulldogs?” Brad asks, grasping onto this football related topic.

Nate smiles at him. “I think the only time I watched a game was their championship run my senior year of high school. But if you’re asking me if I lost my Georgia pride, you don’t have to worry, I still root for the Hawks.”

“The Hawks, Jesus, they still exist?”

“Hey, you should just be glad to know I’m not a Lakers fan.”

“Small favors,” Brad replies sarcastically. “Well, if you’re still around tomorrow, the Falcons are playing the Dolphins in the pre-season and Walt’s band is performing afterwards at Meena’s.”

“I’ll probably be around until the end of the week,” Nate replies, speculatively, wishing his beer would arrive so it would give him something to do other than stare at Brad’s startling blue eyes.

“Then you have no excuse not to come,” Brad answers.

“You know, didn’t I hear something about you playing in college?” Nate replies. Brad was a freshman in college the same year Nate started high school, and he vaguely remembers his Dad and uncle talking about the Colbert boy making it in Division One football. It hadn’t exactly been in a congratulatory way, as the Colberts were well known for being from the wrong side of the metaphorical tracks.

“Notre Dame,” Brad says somewhat dully, rotating the can in his hand.

“Sore subject?”

“A little,” Brad says, but he smiles in spite of it. “I quit after my first season. My dad still hasn’t forgiven me.”

“Getting laid too much?” Nate replies, trying to inject a little humor into the conversation. Seems like nothing he does these days comes out anything other than maudlin and depressing.

“Oh, absolutely,” Brad responds, sarcastically, “After my fifth STD scare, I thought I’d try a condom, but quitting football just seemed easier.”

“Let’s be honest here,” Nate says, trying hard not to laugh, “word around town was that was somewhere around the 9th grade.”

“Not that I wouldn’t love to take credit for that impressive rap sheet, but I didn’t lose my virginity until I was at least 15.”

“Christ that seems young now,” Nate says, wonder coloring his tone. “Who with?”

“You remember April Stafford?”

Of course he remembers April Stafford. She was absolutely everybody on the planet’s jerk off material when he was going through puberty. Except for him of course, much to his adolescent consternation. She was beautiful and built, but she had to have been at least two years ahead of Brad in school and however Brad looks now, it’s still hard to imagine him as a 15-year-old with friggin’ April Stafford.

“You’re lying!” he replies. Brad’s answer is cut off by the arrival of his pancakes.

“Are you boys comparing little black books?” Mabel says disapprovingly, plunking a heaping mound of pancakes slathered in butter and a bottle of syrup in front of him.

“We would never,” Nate replies sweetly.

She looks pointedly at Brad. “He would.”

Brad rolls his eyes at her, and while he seems exasperated, it’s clearly a fond gesture. “Just bring him his beer, and no commentary, you old eavesdropper.”

She smacks him lightly upside the head and then walks off towards the kitchen, yelling over her shoulder, “Old my ass, boy, you’ll drop dead before me, mark my words.”

“Yeah, since her nephew seems unshakably determined to shoot me to death,” Brad says for Nate’s ears.

Nate pauses over his pancakes. “You’ve been shot?”

“Yeah, two weeks into the job,” Brad replies, “And he’s never given up on the notion of finishing what he started.”

He says it so deadpan that Nate has no idea how to respond, after a moment the only thing he can think to do is laugh. “I do not miss this town.”

The face Brad makes is as close kin to fervent agreement as his normal impassivity will allow.

*

The next morning he decides to be proactive about the books. But before that, he’s got to find some way to get them back to his Los Angeles apartment, start proceedings for the sale of the furniture, and go through the contents of the trunk. Most importantly, he needs to get out of here. He’s lucky no situation has arisen with work, because even with everything running as it should, he’s got about 40 missed calls and a rash of increasingly urgent emails from the intern they’ve got doing his calendaring.

Of course in a place like this, there’s no wham, bam, thank you, ma’am answer to getting anything at all done. A cursory internet search last night told him he was going to have to drive all the way to Atlanta to find a service familiar with shipping art, curios, and rare books.

The drive over with the books carefully packed up on the backseat reminds him of being in high school again. The only thing they’d had to do on weekends when he was growing up was drive into the city, spending the whole 45 minutes arguing over whose hastily cobbled together CD-R would play next. They’d always taken Nate’s car—a 96’ Dodge Viper that he’d received for his 16th birthday. He’d loved the Viper, but his dad had bought it and paid for the car insurance besides. It had been a tough decision to leave that ride behind, but he wouldn’t have put it past his father to report it stolen and track him down that way.

He’s always wondered if his Dad tried or if he just gave his gay son up for dead and put it behind him. He’d always hated complications—‘either remove the obstacles or see through them,’ he’d say when Nate was having trouble with math problems, or other classmates, or track practice.

On the return drive, one of those very same work emergencies catches up with him, which naturally means he gets a flat about 4 miles out of town. Twelve Oaks does not want him back any more than he wants to be there.

After assessing that he is not at all equipped to fix the tire, he calls Triple A. Based on his 818 area code they route him through their Los Angeles office. After nearly ten minutes of being put on hold while they increasingly bounce him around trying to find a towing service anywhere near him he gives up and calls Monty’s, the local garage, knowing it’ll probably be at least an hour before a tow truck arrives. He wouldn’t mind so much, but it’s 92 degrees out and he gets terrible cell reception out here and all of his calls to LA have been adventures in piecing together half-heard sentences.

Fifteen minutes later, when a police cruiser pulls up on the other side of the road, his dress shirt and slacks are already soaked in sweat. When Brad emerges from the car, Nate holds up a finger signaling for quiet.

“Yes, I know I’m not there, I understand how that would bother you, but I’m telling you right now it’s not the problem you think it is,” he says to his client on the other end of the line. His client starts shouting, panicked and Nate sighs. “Mr. Kevins, I need you to listen to me, this is what you are going to do. You are going to put your daughter in rehab, somewhere far away from Los Angeles. They don’t require consent of the minor in Utah, so have your staff look up some clinics there. And next, you’re going to roll out an initiative for the parcel tax, where the funds collected will go to public education.”

Brad looks at him in askance, standing next to the Lexus. Nate shakes his head and mouths ‘work.’ “Yes, Mr. Kevins, I know you do not support the parcel tax, but that’s exactly why you’re going to do it. You need to take the focus away from your tough stance on drug violations if you don’t want to look like a complete hypocrite. How better to do that but a reversal on a former strongly held position? Now, which precinct is she being held at? I will call them, but be prepared to make a large personal donation to the 11 99 Union to keep her name out of the press.”

Assemblyman Kevins gives him the precinct and Nate waves at Brad and mouths, “Pen?” Brad looks blankly back at him before checking all of his pockets and coming up empty. Nate shakes his head in a way that he hopes conveys that it’s no big deal, but Brad walks back to the police cruiser and comes back with a ballpoint.

Nate scrawls “West LA #8” on the inside of his wrist. “Kevin, I’m going to hang up now. I will call you back when I’ve dealt with the arrest. Do not do anything stupid.”

He sighs and tucks the phone into the back of his pants. “Sorry about that, what are you doing here?”

“Word on the wire was you needed a lift,” Brad says with a smile, surveying the stupid Lexus rental. “Monty’s on his lunch break and you know he’s not going to get around to towing the car until 2.”

“Small towns,” Nate replies dryly.

“Hey now, I picked your ass up, didn’t I?” Brad ushers him into his car.

Nate sighs in relief when he gets into the air-conditioned interior. “And am I not most grateful?”

Brad snorts.

Nate redirects all of the vents on his side of the car so that they’re pointing straight at him. “When we get back into town I’m going to have to see if I can sneak into the pool up at the house.”

“Don’t want to run into your family?” Brad asks, pulling a smooth U and heading back towards town.

“God no, my sisters I can handle, everybody else can get hit by a car. Hell, they can get hit by a car a couple of times.”

“Careful now, any road deaths and I’ll know just who to arrest.” His cool smile is directed ahead at the road, but Nate finds himself grinning in answer anyway.

“Morbid though it may be, I’m pretty sure if I wanted to murder my entire family you would never know.” Nate hasn’t had to hide bodies in his line of work yet, but he figures he could do an admirable job of it.

“Speaking of which,” Brad says, “What exactly do you do?”

“I’m a political operative,” Nate replies. There’s not much else he can say without violating his clientele’s privacy, so he clears his throat. “As you can see it’s a real blast.”

“Hmm,” Brad replies, considering. The rest of the five-minute drive back into town is strangely silent, and Nate wonders if he messed up somehow. It had perhaps been a little déclassé to be so overtly murderous about his family, even if every resident for ten miles around is perfectly aware of it.

He’s just contemplating if he should say something to Brad when he pulls up in front of the Oddfellow.

“You should check out the quarry,” he says just as Nate’s opening his mouth.

“Pardon?”

“The watering hole on the old Anderson place?” Brad offers. “You won’t have to see your family if you want to go for a swim.”

Nate’s never been past Magnolia Street on that side of town. From the way his parents had spoken about it, he’d been afraid to even ride his bike past the invisible line they’d catastrophized for him. “I didn’t know there was anywhere else besides the Grove Circus Club and the high school gym.”

Brad raises his brows. “Us poor folk had to do something in the summer.”

“What, you didn’t swim in the horse trough?” Nate replies, as dryly as he could muster.

“Careful, young son, my granddaddy loved the horse trough in the back of our place.”

“Liar. I remember your grandfather. He was barely an inch shorter than you.”

“Alright,” Brad replies affably, “you’ve got me. There was no horse trough. But we did go to the Quarry all the time when I was little.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Nate says, finally cracking his door open. The sticky air slams into him, dragging at his clothes like thousand pound weights as he forces his way from the car. He turns around despite the heat and ducks to say, “And for the ride.”

Brad leans over the gearshift to meet his gaze. “Just making less work for myself. Wouldn’t want to have to haul you in for trespassing. My usual five visits a day up to The House are enough.”

“What?” Nate says.

“Your infamous progenitors like to use the sheriff’s department as their personal concierge service,” Brad replies, shaking his head.

Nate rubs at his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Brad laughs. “Shut the door, Fick, you’re wasting my A/C.”

Nate closes the door with his hip. He remains at the curb until Brad drives off, feeling strangely reenergized.

*

He’s avoiding his sisters. Nobody would fault him for it, but Kat is about to pop with her first baby and though he feels guilty, the thought of being anywhere near her or Holly fills him with unease. He finds he’s unable to think of anything else on his runs all the way out to the Quarry. Not even with the iPod shuffle clipped to his shorts blaring AC/DC as loud as his headphones would go.

This is what being a crazy person must feel like. It’s a million degrees out. Running is downright painful in this soup, every breath feels like it’s about to kill him, and yet he’s glad he had the foresight to bring his running shoes along for his trip to Ottawa. Nobody knows yet that he didn’t just drive from the airport, but that he’d spent over a day in the car just to get here—he hadn’t felt much like telling them. When he got the call about Aunt Emma it was 4 AM at LAX and he’d just gotten his baggage off the carousel. He went straight over to the Delta flight desk and they’d blearily informed him there were no flights into Hartsfield-Jackson because of hurricane warnings in the area.

He stepped out into the chilly morning air, thank god for deserts, hopped on the shuttle for the Hertz rent-a-car, used his Club Gold card, and dumped all of his stuff into the back of the Lexus they gave him. It was a nightmare that wouldn’t end and not just because he’s racking up insane charges for every day he keeps the car. He only planned to stay for the funeral and to settle whatever needed settled, and yet, here he still is, yearning after the unattainable sheriff and dodging his sisters. He’d actually jerked off in the shower thinking about Brad the night before—breaking his near uninterrupted streak of using Barry Zito for that express purpose. Nate hasn’t had a lot of time to do anything other than fantasize about baseball players in a long while.

He finally reaches the water’s edge and comes to a stop, collapsing on a flattened patch of grass. He’s as red as a lobster, sweating powerfully, with lungs that ache. It takes a near Sisyphean effort to remove his shoes and shirt and detangle himself from his headphones to crawl his way into the water. It’s a shock to his system, cold from the shade and deep. When he ducks his head under he can’t see the bottom. If he had goggles he might’ve swum down to find it.

It occurs to him, as he’s floating with all of his thousand distractions removed, that he’s being a child. He’s a big boy now and he can fix this situation. Or at least give his sisters some family time before returning the rental, boarding a first class flight that he would bill to one of his clients, and leaving forever if he could help it. Why is he even being such a chicken about it? He speaks to Kat every two weeks or so and Holly was forever Facebooking things at him. He supposes the thought of his mother and grandmother so concrete and real and within a two mile radius of him is upsetting his equilibrium. Not to mention his cousins—who’d glared at him when he ran into them outside of the Sweetwater and shouldered by him without a word. After the entire damn town trying so hard to pretend Nate was as normal as all the happy heterosexuals, it had been jarring.

He stays in the water until his fingers and toes turn prune-y and then he hauls himself out, feeling a little more certain of himself. He toes his running shoes back on and decides what the hell, why not run the whole way back too. There’s a cold shower on the other side.

*

He meets up with Brad, Ray, and Walt at Meena's for the game. They’re already well into their first round.

“Got a bit of a burn there?” Walt asks, gesturing at the bridge of his nose.

Nate nods. “Looks a lot better than the tops of my shoulders though,” he explains. “I didn’t reapply sunscreen after my swim.”

“You went to the Quarry after all?” Brad asks, spinning his empty pint glass on the tabletop.

Nate nods assent. “It’s very pretty. I wish I had known about it sooner. I considered taking a leap off that tire swing.”

“My great uncle hung that,” Brad says.

“You went to the quarry?” Ray repeats. “The quarry is for po’ people, Fick-man.”

Brad hits Ray upside the head before Nate can even formulate a response and they start arguing heatedly.

Nate clears his throat. “I’m going to get a round. Any requests?”

Brad and Ray don’t answer and Walt sighs, clearly put upon and well accustomed to this display of childish bickering. “Bud Light all around.”

“You got it,” Nate says and heads for the bar, holding back a smile as Brad excoriates Ray’s mother’s trailer trash ancestry.

He orders a pitcher of Bud for the guys and nearly passes out from joy at the fact that they have Goose Island on tap. The bartender smiles at him, his relief telegraphing itself loud and clear.

“Fish out of water?” she asks as she pulls his pint.

“That obvious?” he replies ruefully. A kid further down the bar gives a loud snort.

Nate clears his throat and ignores the kid. “Can I also get a plate of your hot wings?”

“Medium, hot, or painful? I bet I can guess,” she tells him, flirting, possibly the lone person in town who hasn’t learned of his immense, problematic gayness.

“Medium’s fine,” he says, cutting her off before she can embarrass herself. “I don’t want to be crying into my chicken.”

She nods and goes to bring his ticket to the kitchen. Just as she’s handing over his pint and the three cups for the pitcher, the kid down the bar snorts again.

“Everything alright?” Nate asks mildly. The kid’s good looking in that milk-fed, dime-a-dozen, Southern way with sandy blond hair falling into his eyes. His head’s bent into his palm like he needs to hold it up. There’s a Poptop Schaefer sitting at his elbow, the cheapest thing at the bar, and he’s easily the drunkest person in here.

“How is the town faggot finding everything?”

Nate blinks at him and then shrugs. It’s been a very long time since somebody's had the guts to say something like that to his face. Most of the people here have been kind to him, if upfront that they know he’s still going to hell, flaming all the way. “Eh you know, too humid for my tastes.”

“What?” the kid asks, clearly confused by his less than infuriated reaction.

Nate gives him a snort of his own and then walks back to the table where the fight has somehow progressed to what classic video games are better—Duke Nukem or Tekken. Nate thinks Ray is actually about to break out diagrams. Walt eagerly accepts the pitcher from him, with a “thank you, Jesus.” Brad suddenly cuts Ray off with a simple “quiet” before turning his gaze pointedly at Nate.

“A little trouble at the bar?” he asks, blue eyes grave. Walt pauses, nearly overfilling Ray’s glass.

Nate hides his astonishment by righting Walt’s hand on the pitcher – Brad clearly misses nothing. “Comes with the territory,” he replies, putting as much finality into his tone as possible.

Brad lets it go.

“Did you order wings? Tell me you ordered wings!” Ray says, changing the subject.

“If you like medium, you’re welcome to them.”

“Medium?” Ray is outraged. “You have been out of the South for too long, Fickster.”

Nate is unwilling to cede the point entirely. “Honestly, it was more to dispel the likelihood of the bartender distressing us both terribly with a come on.”

“‘I bet I can guess what you like?’,” Brad replies, pitching his voice up an octave.

“Yes, both ‘painful’ and ‘hot’ seemed like they were trending in a direction I wouldn't like much.”

“What?” Ray looks back and forth between them both. “Is that a move? That is a move. Eileen has never made a move on me! Disgraceful.”

“I wouldn’t be making moves on your asymmetrical ass either,” Walt replies.

“Walt! I told you about that in confidence.”

Brad sets his full pint glass definitively down on the table. “What’s this about?”

“Not a word!” Ray demands, staring beseechingly at Walt.

Walt takes a long swig of his beer, enjoying the suspense and fending Ray’s desperate attempts to silence him off with his other arm. “Ray’s only got one testicle.”

“What? I am outraged! How did I miss this?” Brad leans back in his chair, his face lit with wonder. Nate meanwhile is trying not to cough up a lung while holding in his laughter.

“Apparently there was an accident with a BB gun,” Walt replies.

“I hate you, I hate you all. You are a cruel and oafish lot! You too Nate, don’t think I don’t see you trying not to laugh,” Ray’s Southern accent seems to dissipate in his rage, and while his indignation is too funny, Nate suddenly begins to see how this Hawaiian print-shirt wearing weirdo is such an effective lawyer.

“What’s the worst come-on you ever got, Ray?” Nate asks, trying to redirect attention away from Ray’s testicular predicament. Walt and Brad are still giggling into their beer like middle school girls and repeating “one nut” over and over.

Ray sweeps a dirty look over them all but allows himself to be distracted. “It wasn’t the come-on that was so bad, it was more the situation. It was my fifth-cousin once removed at a family reunion when I had just graduated college. I spent the whole time glued to my Grammy’s side while she talked about corns and bunions and geriatric toilets, because it was the only place safe from Betty-Jo.”

“Betty-Jo?” Brad repeats incredulously. “Jesus, Ray, your family. I recommend more BB gun accidents in your future.”

Ray swipes at him, but Brad ducks without even spilling a drop of his beer while Ray shouts at him, “You’re an unfeeling classist jackass for somebody who comes from inbred mountain criminal stock.”

Brad just laughs harder.

“What about you, Nate?” Ray repeats primly. “What’s the worst come on you ever got?”

“I’m not sure I want to hear this,” Walt says faintly.

“Honestly, I haven’t gotten many inappropriate come-ons. Gay men are pretty up front—” he says and then pauses. “Well, there was this one time though that these jailbait twins were in the bar I worked at in college. This is a long, long time ago, but it still haunts me. I’m not entirely certain they were legal, but they had good fakes—good enough to get past the bouncer anyway. Suddenly about two hours into their bar tab, they started talking about how they had been messing around with each other for years, but they’d only recently tried penetrative sex a week before and now they were looking for anybody willing to do it with them, because they were identical and it was ‘too much like masturbation.’ That was upsetting.”

“What? What is wrong with you! TWINS! That is like every straight man’s fantasy,” Ray replies, outraged.

“Believe me, until that moment I was right there with you,” Nate tells him, “But when I was actually confronted with it? It was pretty damn horrifying.”

“I think dick has just warped your brain and you don’t appreciate what’s right in front of you.” Ray leans back in his chair, crossing his arms.

“Brad has a good one,” Walt interjected.

“Walt,” Brad replies warningly in the middle of pouring himself more beer. Nate gives him a speculative glance.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say,” Walt says dropping his eyes to the table.

“No, no, no, you don’t get to do that. You already spilled the deepest darkest secret I had.”

“This is true,” Walt replies equably. “Sorry, Brad.”

“Well?” Ray prompts.

Brad rolls his eyes.

“So we had this one perp who was constantly getting into scrapes—‘accidentally’ shooting her boyfriend, ‘accidentally’ robbing a convenience store, ‘accidentally’ going 50 miles in excess of the speed limit, you get the idea.”

“I remember that one!” Ray cries, “she spent more time in court than I did. What was her name? Cindy? Candy?”

“Cheryl-Lee,” Brad says resignedly, finishing off his third beer and pouring the last dregs of the pitcher into his glass.

“Mmmhm,” Walt says, nodding. “Anyway, she took a bit of a shine to Brad, and once, probably the fifth time we picked her up for questioning, she says to Brad, ‘Do you know what the difference is between jam and jelly?’ And Brad, who’s been up for sixteen hours chasing down a firebug who was torching abandoned buildings in the area, just walks right into it. ‘No, ma’am,’ he says, and she, hand-to-god, cackles and says, ‘You can’t jelly your cock up my ass.”

Brad groans, head in hands, and Walt cracks up.

“And the worst bit is: it takes him a second to figure out what the hell she just said to him. I have never seen him get so red. He practically threw her into the back of the cruiser.”

Ray shook his head in wonder. “That is just beautiful. Cheryl-Lee’s hot, Brad! What gives?”

“She’s hands-down the craziest woman I’ve ever met, and that includes Adele Fick. No offense, Nate,” Brad replies, shooting an apologetic glance at Nate.

“None taken, nobody knows better than me about my grandmother.”

Ray makes a noise of disgust. “I fail to see how either of those situations are as ‘horrifying,’ as you pussies term it.”

Brad leaned forward on the table with a somber glance. “Well, Ray, that is because you are fucked up.”

Before it can descend into another ridiculous argument, Nate changes the subject again. “So how about the game?”

“The game?” Walt asks. “There’s a game on?”

“Brad hates football and Walt is Walt,” Ray explains.

“You hate football?” Nate turns to Brad.

Brad shrugs, but he looks sheepish. Nate has no idea why he lied to him. For crying out loud, Brad played football. Maybe he just knew Nate needed to get out of the Oddfellow and stop stewing by himself. Whatever it was Nate decides to be kind and not call Brad on it. There is clearly a story there, between quitting the team at Notre Dame and his apparent hatred of football—Nate is very curious to know what that is about.

“Hmm, my mistake, what time does your set start, Walt?”

“At 10 pm, so I have plenty of time to get shitfaced before I go on.”

Everybody laughs and then thankfully for Nate’s growling stomach his wings arrive. Ray refuses to eat the ‘sacrilegiously mild’ wings, but Walt and Brad both eagerly help Nate out and soon they’ve finished them all off and Walt, married and safe from Eileen, goes to order some suitably hot wings along with another pitcher of Budweiser.

By 9:30 pm, Walt’s bandmates have arrived and he breaks off to go drink with them and prepare.

“Are they any good?” Nate asks.

“Eh…” Brad says, and shakes his hand back and forth in the universal sign for so-so.

“Dickbag,” Ray replies, clearly more out of solidarity with his best friend than actual offense, shoving at Brad’s shoulder. After a moment he says, “It’s kinda true though. I mean, Walt’s good, but the rest of those fuckers…” he trails off meaningfully. Brad nods along with him.

When Walt and his band, W. Hasser and The Georgia Bluegrass, come on, the best that can be said about them is that they’re enthusiastic. Never the less, it’s still fun to listen to them and Ray has splurged and agreed to get a pitcher of Nate’s “classy” Northern beer. Nate realizes, halfway through the set and a few too many beers later, that he hasn’t stressed out about his family or his sisters since he arrived. He waits for one horrifying moment for all of the anxiety to come rushing back, but he seems to have well banished it for the night.

Of course, because all good things must come to an end, Nate’s cell goes off during the encore. It’s a Los Angeles area code so he knows he has to pick it up. He excuses himself and steps out back to take the call.

“Nate Fick,” he says, answering the phone and internally reminding himself he’s three hours ahead of California and a big part of his business is being available all the time. Although it’s getting tiresome the longer he’s out here. He may leave the city, but his clients never stop fucking shit up.

Behind a dumpster he spies the kid from earlier puking copiously and barely keeping his feet under him. The constant retching is distracting and he takes a few steps away, but still finds himself listening with only half an ear as a client relates how he was caught on tape doing awkward things with a hooker in a hotel room.

The kid makes a few more feeble gagging noises and then straightens up, noticing Nate on his cellphone only a few feet away. He’s bleary-eyed and pathetic looking, but something in his face hardens as he looks at Nate.

“You,” he snarls, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand.

Nate sighs and says into the cell, “Forgive me, but I’m going to have to call you back in a little bit.”

He hangs up before the comptroller can protest.

“Yes, me,” he says, addressing the stupid kid this time.

“This place isn’t for you—making people gay and waltzing around like it’s okay.”

“Making people gay?” he repeats, sliding the cell into his pants pocket. Suddenly he understands exactly what this is about and has to hold in an angry breath. “It’s true, I haven’t met my conversion quota yet this month.”

“Don’t you fucking make jokes at me, you fucking fairy,” the kid replies, lurching forward, face red from anger and alcohol. He reeks of vomit and stale beer.

Nate sighs and steps back when the kid makes a grab for him, watching unmoved as he stumbles piteously.

He goes for Nate just as the backdoor slams open and a voice calls, “Nate?”

Brad steps out into the alleyway, taking in Nate and his anti-gay fanclub with one stony-faced glance. In Nate’s distraction he doesn’t notice the awkward hand grabbing at his shirt collar until the kid’s got a pretty firm grip on it.

Brad doesn’t move, but the shift in his stance speaks volumes. “You are making one hell of a mistake,” he says, voice low and dangerous. Even though he’s not in uniform, he’s every inch the sheriff.

“Some of us don’t want it, some of us don’t prance around like it’s all okay,” the kid says, body suddenly wracked with horrified desperate sobs. Nate sighs and closes his fist around the kid’s hand, gently disentangling his fingers from his collar.

“It’s okay, Brad, I got this.” He looks over and Brad hasn’t budged. “Can you get a glass of water?”

Brad hesitates, but when Nate raises his eyebrows he nods and goes back into the bar. When he leaves Nate gets the kid, Johnnie Walker, propped up against the building and standing on his own strength.

‘Bad joke,’ Johnnie explains, referring to his name, in a sudden moment of calm lucidity before hiccuping and descending into tears again.

“Okay, listen to me, Johnnie,” Nate replies, making sure to keep eye contact even when Johnnie looks away. “You don’t want to hear this, but it is never going to fucking change. You can only change how you feel about it. It’s not like losing weight, or kicking an addiction, or learning a language. This is what you are and you can hide it from everyone else—hell in this town, I would recommend it—but you cannot hide it from yourself.”

Johnnie nods at him weakly, but he closes his eyes and the tears keep coming. Nate remembers feeling like this, how it had slowly eaten at his whole world. And now this kid is falling apart in front of him, drinking alone with a fake he probably got with friends in Atlanta, because he’s terrified those same friends will see him for what he is. Nate can only ask himself why, knowing he’ll never get an answer. Everything could be absolutely peachy about his family, and he still wouldn’t want to live in this town.

This time Nate doesn’t notice Brad sneak up on them until Brad’s thrusting a plastic cup brimming with water under the kid’s nose.

“Drink it,” he orders and Johnnie takes a long swallow without question. Brad raises an eyebrow at Nate and then asks, “What’s your birthdate?”

The kid scrunches up his face, thinking hard. “1993—nope, nope—I memorized this, ’92.”

Nate laughs and rubs at his eyes while Brad blows out an incredulous breath.

Brad’s still looking at the kid, but Nate knows he’s talking to him. “What would you like me to do?”

“Can we take him home?” Nate asks, “I think he’s probably punished himself enough.”

Brad doesn’t fight him on it. “The cruiser’s parked around front.”

*

“Where do you live now?” Nate asks on a whim, trying to break the bleak silence in the car after they’ve dumped Johnnie off at home. Nate slipped him his business card after Brad let him out of the backseat and marched him off to his bewildered parents. The scrawled ‘call me’ on the back isn’t enough, but it’s all he can do.

There seem to be a lot of awkward silences in his life these days.

Brad clears his throat. “Not too far from here, actually.”

“No longer on the wrong side of the tracks?” Nate asks, teasing. He’s trying to picture what Brad’s home would look like, but he’s got absolutely no clue. It just puts into sharp relief how little Nate knows him—but it doesn’t feel that way. He’s comfortable with Brad—maybe too comfortable.

“Wherever I am instantly becomes the wrong side of the tracks, obviously.”

“That sounds like something my grandmother would say.”

“Oh believe me, she has,” Brad tells him, dry as the storm drains of Los Angeles.

Nate can’t even feel embarrassment for her anymore. He simply winces at the fact that his grandmother clearly scored a hit off Brad and offers a humble, “I’m sorry.”

Something about this seems to incense Brad because he swears and unexpectedly pulls the car over right in front of a row of sedate clapboard houses. Nate stares at him, brow furrowed.

“What—”

“Shut up,” Brad interrupts and then he’s dragging Nate in by the same part of his collar Johnnie had and while Nate’s thinking about how much he’s going to need to starch it to get it flat again, Brad crashes their mouths together. It’s too surprising to be much of a kiss; Brad leans further over the gearshift and his hand comes up to frame Nate’s face. His mouth softens into sensual glide that sends a frisson of heat traveling up Nate’s back to his suddenly light head.

He tries to say something when Brad pulls back, fingertips at his mouth, but Brad interrupts him again, “We’re going to my place.”

“Do I get a say?” Nate asks softly, even though he has no intention of refusing, and from the look Brad gives him, Brad knows it. He wants to laugh and kiss Brad again and maybe blow him right here in the car, like he never got a chance in high school, but he doubts that would be appropriate with the goddamned county sheriff and all those public indecency laws. Nate spends too much time doing damage control to be anything other than devotedly circumspect, especially now that he’s returned to his least favorite level of hell in the Deep South. “How far away from here?”

“Less than a mile.” Brad merges back onto the road with a quick searing glance at him. Nate’s still utterly stupefied that Brad is interested, that Brad Colbert, of all the people on the planet—just ordered Nate into bed with him. He can’t stop staring at the light catching Brad’s blond eyelashes, or his casual one-handed driving, or the way his legs are spread in his seat like he has to make room for his cock.

The car ride feels more like thirty miles and Nate has no idea how Brad seems so unhurried and level-headed. Nate is shaky and feels divorced from his good sense—he honestly contemplated giving Brad roadhead after all. After an evilly slow passage of time, they pull up in front of an unassuming little house set back from the road. The walk up the drive is sedate and silent, but when the door closes behind them, Brad backs Nate against it. He doesn’t kiss him, just braces a palm above Nate’s shoulder like he has all the time in the world, blue eyes shadowed and intent upon him. The space between them is electric. Nate can feel every cubic inch of that empty air.

“C’mere,” he whispers, tugging Brad in by his hips and raising himself up to meet his lips. It’s a startlingly chaste kiss and Nate can’t help smiling into it, before backing off. “What are you waiting for?”

“I just want to do this right,” Brad says, his face illegible.

Nate huffs out a laugh and then kisses him again. They stay like that, leaning up against the door, kissing leisurely. He gets harder in his trousers than he feels he’s ever been. Brad tastes good and he kisses like he knows Nate and everything he needs and wants.

Finally Nate eases off, mouth sore and hands trembling from delayed arousal, pulling Brad’s hips against his so that he can feel Nate's gabardine-covered erection. “Enough of this.”

Brad grins and swipes his thumb across his lower lip. It’s red and spit-wet, and Nate has obscene flashes of it stretched around his dick, sliding across his body, opening up his ass. He breathes deeply and focuses. There’s an order here, a way he wants to play this out.

“You’re going to take off your clothes and I’m going to suck you off.”

“Whatever you like,” Brad returns, walking backwards further into the house. He pulls his t-shirt off and tosses it aside, and Nate heartily wishes the lights were on so he could get a better look at all that tanned skin on display. Nate follows him down the halls and into the bedroom, turning lights on every time he comes across a switch—Brad’s down to his boxers and Nate’s still fully clothed by the time he flicks on the overhead in Brad’s bedroom.

“You are something else,” Nate breathes, watching Brad’s hands intently as he pushes down his boxers revealing his swollen cock. He’s beautiful—long and lean—built like Michelangelo’s David.

“I try,” Brad replies, amusement evident in his voice. Whatever patient ritual they’ve been observing vanishes in a moment when Nate reaches out to touch him. Abruptly, he’s got Brad on the bed, taking in miles of naked skin, and while Brad’s still figuring out what to make of this he sinks to his knees in front of him, taking the head of his cock into his mouth. Brad draws in a breath, more of a gratified, surprised hiss than anything else. When Nate looks up, he finds Brad propped up on his elbows, staring down his body with wide eyes as Nate bobs his head down over his dick.

“Jesus, if only you knew what you looked like,” Brad says and then makes a rumbling noise in the back of his throat when Nate tongues his frenulum before curling into the slit. His head falls back on his shoulders, exposing the long column of this throat and Nate watches it dip with a swallow. It’s so simple a thing and yet it pleases him. He’s good at this—taking it deep and then alternating with kittenish licks at the base all the way along the head. Brad’s big, impressively proportionate to his height, and so it isn’t easy, but Nate’s still quite satisfied with the way the muscles in Brad’s thighs tremble from the effort of staying still.

He places one palm just above Brad’s left knee, squeezing gently into the muscle as a reminder to let go. Brad shifts under him, collapsing all the way back to the bed, his arm slung across his face. Nate takes him deep again, mouth meeting the hand he has circled around the base of Brad’s cock and throat closing adeptly around him as he uses the same Zen like calm he’s perfected towards his family to subdue his gag reflex. He counts it a success when Brad curses.

“Fuck, I’m close. I don’t usually—” he says, voice huskily, “not from—”

In a moment of inspiration Nate presses firm fingers along the muscles in Brad’s groin, taut beneath his touch. The closer he gets to Brad’s dick, the more Brad seems to struggle with holding himself together. Finally, Nate can only drag it out so long, and he presses at the spot just behind Brad’s balls with his thumb, the head of Brad’s dick skating over the roof of his mouth. That’s all it takes. He comes hard in Nate’s mouth with only the barest warning, fingers white knuckled on his Target bedspread. Nate shouldn’t feel so victorious, but he likes being good at what he does, and the fact that coming from head is a rare event for Brad just feeds into plain old masculine pride. Not to mention, Brad is something straight out of a fantasy laid across the bed, eyelids fluttering dreamily and chest rising and falling slowly with every breath.

He pulls off with a pop that makes Brad shiver and groan underneath his hands. He has to fist his hands tight and pause for a moment to breathe. If he doesn’t gather himself under control, he’ll blow his load in his expensive pants in a thoroughly unsatisfying manner. Even looking at Brad, dick laying against his belly, is a shock right to his cock that has him clenching his eyes closed. Heading to the en suite bathroom to rinse his mouth out, Nate has the hysterical thought that maybe he’s filling his gay conversion quota after all.

“Jesus,” Brad says, tracking his progress across the room. “You didn’t keep yourself in food and clothing that way, did you?”

Nate smiles to himself as he washes his hands. When he looks back up into the mirror, Brad’s behind him, chest sheened lightly with sweat. Expecting nobody else’s reflection but his own it startles him entirely.

“My grandmother would say you walk like an Indian,” Nate says, meeting Brad’s eyes in the mirror.

“Shirtless and proud?” Brad says, rubbing at his chest with one long-fingered hand.

“Silent,” Nate clarifies.

“Tools of the trade,” Brad replies and then he’s tugging Nate back against him, nosing the back of his neck. Nate likes the tableau, Brad wrapped around him, naked, even with his own stupidly glassy eyes and the high color in his cheeks.

“You flush all over, don’t you,” Brad states before placing an open-mouthed kiss right below Nate’s ear that makes him shudder in Brad’s grip. He sees Brad’s self-confident smile pressed into his skin in the reflection and it somehow feels more intimate than when he had Brad’s cock in his mouth.

“I guess you’ll have to see,” he says, voice raggedly catching on the last word.

Brad starts unbuttoning Nate’s shirt, chin propped on Nate’s shoulder to watch Nate watching him. It shouldn’t be different than any other time Nate’s had sex with a mirror involved, but Nate feels like he’s on drugs, wobbly and unsure and yet still so frighteningly good. But that’s what being around Brad is like, isn’t it. Whatever happens next could be absolutely terrible, but it won’t matter, because the way he feels now, fired up and breathless, is almost enough to get him there. Brad drags Nate’s shirt down his shoulders, briefly trapping his arms in it, behind his back.

“Hmm,” he says, more to himself than to Nate, “that would be a good look for you.”

“Restrained?” Nate asks when Brad finally allows him to shake his arms free. Brad merely smiles at him and then helps Nate pull his undershirt up over his head.

His eyes drink in Nate’s pale skin layered over the muscles in his chest and abs. “When do you have time to work out in between cleaning up rich assholes’ messes?” he asks, running a slow hand down the center of Nate’s chest, fingertips coasting over the groove between his defined abdominals with only the barest pressure. The light touch feels so good it almost hurts.

Nate doesn’t tell him that his genetics did leave him lucky in one respect. He doesn’t have to work that hard for the muscles, just running and weightlifting at the bench in his bedroom a couple of times a week.

“How’d you know?” he says instead, referring to his job.

“If you were simply a political operative why wouldn’t you be working in DC?” Brad asks, nimble fingers now turning to the zipper on Nate’s fly. “But in LA there are all sorts of people making mistakes—politicians, actors, rock stars. You’re a fixer.”

“Guilty,” Nate says and unashamedly groans when Brad finally wraps his big hand around Nate’s dick. He shuts his eyes, head lolling back on Brad’s shoulder as he starts unhurriedly jerking him off. “A little harder.”

Brad complies, grip smooth and perfect. When the friction on the circumcised head of his cock becomes too much, Brad reaches past him for the Lubriderm on the bathroom counter without being asked.

“Fuccccccck,” Nate says artlessly, drawing the word out.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you swear,” Brad says, “in all of this.”

Nate’s breaths come fast and sharp and he doesn’t have any of it left over to waste on a reply. Brad supports most of his weight now, left arm belted tight around Nate’s waist. It’s just a handjob, a simple handjob, but Nate can picture Brad pushing him forward, fucking him right here against the sink, his face turned into Nate’s neck and making that same choking noise he made when he was coming.

Nate focuses on the distended veins in Brad’s arms, and his own raised veins from where the blood is flowing into his dick. His pants still hang loosely around his hips, belt clinking with every stroke of Brad’s tightened fist. He bites his lip and looks up to find Brad still watching his face in the mirror. He needs something, a little bit more and he’ll be there. He squeezes his own hand around Brad’s and that’s how he comes, with their fingers tangled together and their eyes locked on the mirror.

Its several moments before he’s caught his breath again and Brad’s steps back and away, giving him space. Nate leans forward, needing to prop himself up for just a moment; with palms braced on the sink, he says, “This is not how I expected this day to end.”

Brad laughs and shoulders him aside to wash his hands. “Spend the night,” he says, head bowed like it isn’t a big thing he’s offering.

Nate goes to find where Brad threw his shirt to fold it properly. “As if I would make you drive me back to the Oddfellow after that,” Nate replies, before divesting himself of his trousers and folding them alongside the shirt. It feels good to be naked, especially in the aftermath of that orgasm.

He’s tired. Ever since he got here he hasn’t really been sleeping. For the first time the exhaustion doesn’t feel completely painful, just natural. He’d like to stay up all night, fucking Brad in this bed, rimming him open and making him yell, sucking him off again while he jerked himself off and then coming all over Brad’s chest. He can imagine it all, but there’s that white noise in his hand that tells him the thought is a good one, but a far off one.

“I think I’m just going to pass out,” he says, addressing the bed, voice apologetic.

“That’s fine,” Brad tells him, coming out of the bathroom. He’s found some pajama pants somewhere and Jesus if that isn’t brutally sexy in a whole new way. He smiles at Nate and directs him toward the bed. “I have to take care of some things, but I’ll be right back.”

Nate nods at him and accepts the kiss that Brad presses to the corner of his jaw before leaving the room. Nate veritably tumbles into Brad’s California King bed. He didn’t get a good look at the rest of the place, but he gets the feeling that this immoderately huge bed and the flannel sheets might be the only sign of excess in the whole place. The feel of them on his skin as he slides underneath the covers remind his body that he just came bone-jarringly hard and if only his brain would get with the program he could do it again, but he contents his wandering sleep-starved brains with half-realized fantasies of fucking Brad in this bed, the headboard banging against the wall…

He drifts off and only vaguely notices when the lights switch off and Brad climbs in behind him, pulling him back against his solid chest. With the soft bed and Brad’s arms around him, it’s the most comfortable he’s felt in ages.

*

His cellphone starts ringing at 5 AM. At first he ignores it. Whatever client who is having the ill-considered idea to call him at this time on this day will just have to suffer whatever conflagration they’ve created out of their lives.

But after the phone quiets as it switches over to voicemail it immediately starts ringing again and Nate finally rolls away from Brad’s comforting hold to quiet it. He catches sight of the number and nearly drops it, struggling to swipe across the screen to answer the call in his haste.

“Nate,” his mother says before he can even give a greeting. “Nate, there’s trouble.”

The first words she’s spoken to him in ten years.

“Mom,” he says rustily and then listens in muted horror as his mother starts sobbing gustily into the phone. He doesn’t put it down until Brad has woken up and has come to sit beside him on the edge of the bed.

“What’s up?” Brad asks, voice quiet.

“Kat’s in the hospital. Something’s gone wrong with the baby. She…she was saying all sorts of things about antepartum hemorrhaging and…and complications I don’t know…”

He looks down to find that Brad has laid a hand over his own.

“Where is she?”

“Kennestone in Marietta,” he says dully, knowing how fast they must’ve had to rush her into the emergency room if they couldn’t take her to Emory, the best hospital in the entire state of Georgia and where Nate, his sisters, and all his cousins were delivered.

Brad doesn’t tell him it’ll be okay, or that they’ll make it there before anything worse happens, like Nate he doesn’t deal in anything other than sureties. He simply gets up and starts pulling a discarded pair of jeans on. “We’ll put the cruiser’s lights on,” he says, voice even and reassuring.

Nate finally lets go of his cellphone and goes to retrieve his own clothes. He can’t escape the insidious and ridiculous feeling that he somehow brought this on. If only he’d gone to see her. If only he’d stood with them at the funeral—he has to pause in the middle of buttoning his shirt to choke back a sob.

They fly over the roads on the way to the hospital and Nate like a child, keeps repeating over and over in the quietness of his own head: “Everything will be fine.” But what does that mean? Both Kat and the baby? Just Kat? Just the baby? What if that horrible possibility is what she wants? It’s too scary to contemplate.

When he finds his family in a waiting room in the Obstetrics clinic, they don’t notice his rumpled clothes, or even that he’s got the sheriff in tow. He sees his brother-in-law first standing lost and frozen in front of the vending machine, a man he’s never actually met, but who was apparently in the same class as Kat from kindergarten onward. This man in half-knotted tennis shoes, a Georgia Tech shirt, and jeans that have alarming reddish brown stains on them that can only be blood is the only man she’s ever been with, the only man she’s ever loved, and Nate doesn’t know him at all.

His mother, sitting drawn and pale in a chair facing the double doors leading away to the OR, straightens up in her chair when she sees him. His grandmother, meanwhile, sits with a careful gap of a chairs between them doesn’t even look up from his crossword. Holly lies sleeping, body winched tight to fit across the two chairs across from them.

“It’s bad,” his mother says, voice papery and raw. She leans her head back against the wall to look up at him like she can’t hold it up on her own. “She’s lost a lot of blood and the baby, at only 32 weeks…his lungs aren’t full developed.”

“What happened?” he asks, squatting to meet her eyes.

“Placenta praevia,” his grandmother answers, eyes still on her crossword. “The silly fool hadn’t told us she’d had her first bleeding episode weeks ago.”

His mother’s eyes drop, fingers clenched tight in her lap. “They’re worried about infection now.”

His grandmother snorts. It seems entirely unbelievable, and yet his grandmother is now managing to find fault with the way her eldest granddaughter went into labor. He simply refuses to acknowledge her hateful face if she can’t even be bothered to stop proving a point to him here, in the goddamned hospital of all places.

“Mom, what can I do?” he says.

She shrugs. After a moment she asks, “Maybe…maybe you could grab Holly’s sweater from the car? I’m a little cold.”

She starts crying when she goes to dig her car keys out of her purse. He carefully takes the black leather Proenza bag from her and finds the mass of keys in one of the front pockets.

“I’ll be right back,” he says, patting her on the knee before straightening to his feet.

Brad breaks away from his conversation with Tom, Nate’s brother-in-law, when he walks past. “Are you going to be all right here?”

Nate summons up a weak smile. “You really don’t have any obligation to stay, so if you need to go…”

Brad levels him a look. “I would stay if I could,” he says it firmly, in that sheriff’s voice that brooks no argument. Nate nods. They take the elevator back to the parking garage in silence, Brad subtly brushing their hands together when the only person on it steps off at the ground level. It’s enough. At the moment he is clean out of things to say. Nate gets off at the floor his mother’s car is parked on first. He looks back over his shoulder at Brad who smiles and raises his hand to his ear in the universal sign for ‘call me.’

Nate can’t help the way it makes him want to start grinning. His sister is upstairs, possibly losing her baby, and it’s not enough to dampen how wonderful Brad makes him feel. He doesn’t know why Brad is being so amazing. He’s certainly not sure he deserves it, but he’s greedy for it nevertheless.

*

They wait at the hospital well into the morning. Eventually he has to go outside to speak to his clients. He calls a member of his staff, Wynn, and finally starts delegating like he should’ve done days ago.

“Nate, you sound like you’ve just given up the nuclear destruct codes under torture,” Wynne tells him. “It’s ridiculous and it doesn’t make sense. I think the one time you took a vacation in the last five years was those two extra days you spent in Paris after you got McKaskill’s daughter out of that mess with the Gendermerie.”

Nate just pulls the phone away from his ear to groan into his hands. “I like working more than I like vacations,” he says when he’s back on the line.

“Of course, you freak.”

“And I’m also not above killing you for the fun of it,” Nate tells him.

Wynn laughs. “See, now if you took a vacation, you might be able to curb those murderous impulses.”

Nate snorts. “You are lucky that you know too much.”

When he gets back to the waiting room with coffee for his mother and Tom, Holly is playing on her iPhone. “I just checked into the hospital on Foursquare I was so bored,” she says, “I don’t know what is wrong with me.”

She swipes the coffee for their mother and takes a sip. “Ugh, way too sweet,” she says, before handing it off to mom.

His mother takes her own tentative sip. “You remember how I take it,” she says, looking both surprised and sad.

Nate swallows and ducks his head. “Of course, Mom.” He has to snap Tom out of a daze to take the proffered coffee. Tom quietly says thank you and then goes back to staring straight through the wall.

“Where were you off to, making all those calls?” his grandmother interjects.

“Just dealing with work,” he says simply.

“You can work with your sister bleeding on the operating table?” she asks sharply.

Nate doesn’t even have an answer for that, his mother just wraps Holly’s sweater tighter around her and Holly bites her lip.

“You’re a coldblooded son of a bitch,” his grandmother says, like his mother isn’t just sitting right there, next to her.

“Jesus, Adele,” Tom says, suddenly snapping out of his stupor. Nate seriously doubts he was ever given permission to use his grandmother-in-law’s first name. “What’s he going to do? Swab the surgeon’s forehead himself? As far as I’m concerned he’s being far more helpful than you.”

The four of them sit frozen, stunned by Tom’s sudden outburst. “Nate, why don’t you and Holly get Tom another coffee,” his mother says after a long moment, clutching at the neckline of the sweater.

Holly nearly trips over herself getting up out of her chair.

“Oh, wait,” his mother says, digging in her purse for some change. “Get yourself and Holly something too.”

“Mom, I got it.”

“Will you let me buy something for you?” she says softly, handing him a twenty.

He pauses, caught, unsure why it’s so hard to take the crumpled bill from her. “Okay,” he says when Holly tugs on his arm.

“You can give it to me,” she says, as they walk away.

“Are you in need of charity?” he replies.

“Raiding Gramma’s liquor cabinet only gets you so far,” she replies.

“You mean you don’t like cherry brandy and cooking sherry? Clearly you aren’t desperate enough for this Twenty.”

She punches him in the shoulder.

*

When they get back Tom and Gramma are sitting as far away from each other as possible without rearranging the chairs, his mother adrift between them. The doctor who’s just arrived from the OR to keep them updated looks back and forth at the family members, obviously discombobulated.

Nate clears his throat and walks up, offering his hand. “Hi, I’m Nate Fick, Kat Warner’s older brother. Could you let us know what’s happening?”

The doctor, eyes ringed from exhaustion, nods.

“She’s going to be all right. Unfortunately the PPH was quite severe and due to complications we were forced to do an emergency obstetric hysterectomy.”

His mother makes a sound of agony and when Nate glances her way he notes that his grandmother is white-lipped and tense. Tom’s eyes drop to his hands.

“And the baby?” Nate asks.

“At this stage, we’re not entirely sure. Fetal lung development has been good up to this point, but 7 weeks preterm is about two weeks short of where I could safely give you a positive prediction of survival without complication. He’s in the NICU on surfactant to speed up his lung development, and we’ll let you know the moment anything changes.”

Holly asks, “Is Kat up to visitors?”

“Yes, I think it would be good for her to see her family. She’s feeling a little alone at the moment.”

Kat lies wan and faded in her hospital bed, barely glancing at them when the nurse ushers them in to see her. Mercifully she’s been given her own room, although he doesn’t doubt that the Fick family money had a hand in that.

“Hi, darling,” his mother says, going toward her. Kat starts crying as soon as she crosses the threshold.

“Don’t touch me,” she cries as his mother reaches for her. Holly and Nate stop at the doorway, even his grandmother seems to sense this is not a time for her antics.

“Tom, oh God, Tom,” Kat says and breaks down in sobs as soon as he wraps her in his arms. “I’ll never be able to—” she can’t complete the sentence past the thick rush of tears.

“Shh,” Tom says into her hair, but he’s crying himself.

“C’mon, Elaine,” his grandmother says to his mother, “let’s leave them alone for a little bit.”

She leads his prone mother from the room. “Nathaniel,” she says without looking at him, “take your sister home.”

“Oh, but—” Holly protests.

“All of us fussing over her isn’t going to help her one bit,” his grandmother cuts her off. “We’ll wait here and if you’re needed you can always come back.”

Holly deflates. Nate pats her on the back, watching his grandmother lead his mother back to the waiting room. It astonishes him to see her so helpful and unsarcastic. Ordinarily she’d have put in five digs at him, two for his mother, and one for Kat before she’d even got to the main clause of the sentence.

Holly chews on her lip. “I don’t want to leave Mom alone with Gramma.”

“She’s gotten worse?”

Holly nods but fails to elaborate.

“It looks like Tom set her back one,” Nate offers.

Holly shakes her head in amazed wonder. “I have never seen him do that. Usually he’s tripping all over himself to please her and she’s calling him a no good, no account toadie.”

“Christ,” Nate replies.

“Well, Tom is kind of lame,” Holly says with a shrug.

Nate raises his brow. Tom could be an honest-to-god rug, and he still wouldn’t deserve their grandmother treading all over him, but Holly doesn’t pay him any mind.

“My friends just arrived. They wanted to keep me company. I can ask them to take us home again,” she says, eyes on the floor.

He checks his watch. 3:37 pm. They must have come straight from school.

“Why don’t we do that?” he tells her, “It might be good for you to be around your friends.”

They find three teens, two girls and a boy, waiting in the emergency room looking a bit green about the gills. Nate is surprised to recognize Johnnie among them. He won’t meet Nate’s eyes until he realizes Nate isn’t going to reveal that he knows him.

He excuses himself and pulls out his cellphone as soon as they reach the elevator, trying to take care of whatever work he can on the drive back. It’s Johnnie’s beat up old Cabriolet they’re riding in, but he’s put an expensive imported sound system into the dash and every time he changes a song he keeps glancing over at Nate to gauge his reaction.

When Nate’s put on hold arranging a last minute reservation at the French Laundry for a client who royally botched his fifth anniversary, he throws him a bone and says, “I’m a big fan of BRMC.”

“Really?” Johnnie asks. “They’re coming to the Masquerade in April and I’m trying to get a bunch of people together to see them.”

“They’re good live,” Nate answers and then has to turn his attention back to the French Laundry, amusedly catching the hero worship in Johnnie’s eyes. If only everybody was this easy to appease, he’d be able to open a franchise.

*

After rattling around in his hotel room for a half hour Nate decides to jog over to Brad’s place. Of course, there’s a good chance that Brad isn’t there. Nate doesn’t even have his phone number and while Brad told him to call him, he doesn’t think calling the station is his best bet.

He keeps telling himself he should turn back or run somewhere else, like the Sweetwater, but his feet won’t obey him and he runs the four and a half miles to Brad’s house like his grandmother is trying to run him down in her station wagon. He slows to a walk when he reaches the front door and has to take a few moments to compose himself. After a little bit, when he can finally take a breath without gasping, he rings the bell. Brad answers almost immediately, the two halves of his uniform shirt open over his chest.

Nate was going to say something about his sister being alright or that his grandmother was being surprisingly docile or even hello, but all that comes out is “God, you’re hot.”

Brad takes in his sweat-soaked shirt and the tangle of headphones knotted in his hand and says, “You ran all the way here?”

“I really needed a distraction,” he replies, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm.

Brad steps back from the door and gestures to the rear of the house with his head. Nate goes on ahead of him, glad of the strong air conditioning and shadowed interior.

“You’re overdoing it,” Brad tells him.

“Ain’t that the way,” Nate replies giving him a coy look over his shoulder. “You gonna judge me or join me in the shower?”

Brad’s laughter follows him back to the bedroom and en suite. It’s a nice shower with a bench under the spray even if the cubicle isn’t that large. He flips the tap on and places his hand underneath – good pressure. It strikes the tile bench with a satisfyingly powerful patter.

“The old couple I bought the place from had it installed,” Brad says. Nate hears his belt clink when it hits the ground, but he doesn’t turn around to look. “It has its uses.”

“I can’t imagine what you mean,” Nate says, but two minutes later he still finds himself spread across Brad’s lap, cool water raining down on them, the hard shaft of Brad’s cock between his cheeks. Mostly he’s just enjoying the spray as it runs over his heated skin, but the kisses Brad lays across his shoulders and the slide of his cock across Nate’s hole makes him groan almost pathetically. It has been a really, really long time since he let himself get wrapped up in something like this.

Brad’s hand plays along the inside of his thigh, but Nate makes no move to rush him along.

“You should consider more judicious sunscreen use,” Brad tells him, tongue making contact with the fading burn at the back of his neck. It’s not bad, but it is sensitized and the swipe of Brad’s tongue across it makes him shiver. “You have beautiful pale skin.”

Nate looks down. Brad’s arm across his leg is several shades darker. He’s evenly tanned everywhere, unlike Nate who is mostly milk pale until you hit his waistline where he turns so light you can see the threading of his veins. Nate has no idea how he manages it. He noticed coming up the drive in daylight that the yard is very well tended – perhaps Brad gardens naked.

Brad’s fingers finally curl around his cock and it makes him arch back into Brad’s body. Brad moans and drops his forehead to Nate’s shoulder. Nate smiles and purposefully grinds against him.

“Stop that,” Brad says, hand tightening fractionally on Nate’s cock, “I don’t want this to be over too soon.”

Nate doesn’t listen and deliberately rolls his hips, enjoying the way Brad’s legs stiffen with tension underneath him. “Ah, is there something you’re hoping to achieve here?”

“Forgive me for speaking plain, but I was hoping to fuck you.”

Nate twists to meet his mouth in a kiss, chilly shower water flavoring it. He pulls away and when Brad follows him for another, he shrugs out of Brad’s hold to step out of the shower. He grabs one of the fluffy towels folded in a cubby above the toilet tank and towels down in Brad’s bedroom, listening as the shower shuts off moments later. The window in Brad’s bedroom faces south and the yard, and so strong shadows are cast, lighting up the fine hairs on his arms and legs, making his skin glow. The air from the AC is slightly too cold now, but the sun is welcome. When was the last time he had sex in daylight? When was the last time he had sex?

Brad comes out of the bathroom toweling down his hair; water has turned the blonde dark gold. He’s so godforsaken attractive Nate has to look away. Nate has both condoms and a foil packet of lube in his wallet, mostly not for him, but in case a situation arises that he needs to provide it for someone else, and he finds both in his discarded shorts.

Nate glances down at Brad’s dick which is full and hard between his legs and then the quarter sized packet in his palm. “Do you have stuff?”

Brad barely holds back a smile, but Nate can tell he’s not trying very hard. He rummages around in his nightstand and comes up with a small bottle of KY with the seal unbroken.

It makes Nate pause. “Have you done this before?”

Brad’s eyes widen. “Yes?”

Nate raises a brow.

“Yes!” Brad replies. “It’s just…I don’t get laid very often around here.”

“Oh,” Nate says, unsure why he’s blushing, “I wasn’t sure if you were bisexual or…or…I have no idea.”

He looks down at the bottle in his hands. He’s having a hard time getting it open, his short nails are useless against the tight plastic seal.

Brad takes it from him and breaks the seal with the edge of one of his keys, peeling the plastic back.

“I don’t know what I am—flexible maybe? It’s just this town, being the sheriff—I just don’t get many opportunities to date.” He tosses his keys onto his dresser where they land with in a jangling clatter. “But I have done this before.”

“I believe you.” Nate smiles and holds his hand out for the KY. Brad holds onto it, searching his eyes like he’s not entirely certain he trusts what Nate said. “I do.”

Brad finally hands it over with a sigh. Nate pops the cap off and pours a big dollop into his hand. There’s no easy graceful and romantic way to do this, so he just settles himself back on the bed and goes for it. It’s been too long and the stretch of even one finger takes a little to get used to.

“C’mere,” he tells Brad, who is just standing by the bed staring at him. It seems to jolt Brad out of the reverie he’s in and he comes to lie down beside him.

“Let me,” Brad says, pushing at Nate’s shoulder until he turns on his side. He spoons up behind Nate and swipes more lube out of Nate’s open palm, coating his fingers liberally before stroking between his buttocks. He pushes a finger inside with more care than Nate used on himself.

“So you’re flexible—” Nate says, voice hitching when Brad pushes another finger inside. Nate has big hands, he’s a big guy—but that’s nothing on Brad’s hands with their long fingers and thick knuckles, currently he’s learning just how much bigger. The ache feels good—like a tense muscle finally letting go.

“Mmhm,” Brad replies.

“Did quitting the football team have something to do with another boy,” Nate asks, having trouble keeping his voice steady as Brad slowly twists his fingers. He glides right across Nate’s prostate, making him shudder.

Brad does it again. “You’re too sharp by half.”

“Oh, fuck,” Nate says, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “Okay, give me a third.”

“We can go slow,” Brad protests.

Nate can feel Brad’s leaking dick against the back of his thigh and he wants it inside him. He wants to forget himself and all of the bullshit of this place—how guilty and helpless he feels. Nate ignores this protest and after a moment Brad steadily eases in his ring finger. “Does anybody here know?”

“The only people who knew were at Notre Dame with me. It just seemed better to quit football than to let it blow up into this big thing. I never really cared about playing either—that was my dad’s dream.” Brad hesitates. “You know, this is a very strange conversation we’re having.”

“Would you like me to stop?” Nate asks.

“No, you’re fine,” Brad replies, a light laugh in his tone. “You just never stop going, do you? I can barely think—with the way you look. God, the way you feel.”

“Best time to ask somebody penetrating questions,” Nate says, pushing back into Brad’s hand. He’s still probably too tight, and the smart thing would be to go slow, at least for a little while longer, but he’s breathing hard, and his own cock is stiff against his belly. At this point? Fuck slow. “Well, you think you’re up to it?”

“Are you looking to get yourself in trouble?” Brad asks, humor evident in his voice.

“Brad…”

“Nate,” Brad answers. He pulls his fingers free gently and leans further over Nate to kiss him searchingly. Nate has to contort himself to meet Brad’s mouth the way he wants.

“Whatever you want,” Brad whispers after cutting off the kiss.

He has to reach back into the nightstand to get a condom on and by the time he’s finally back at Nate’s side the setting sun is so bright through the window, Nate has to shut his eyes. When Brad pushes inside, he feels it that much more, opening stretching taut around the heavy head of Brad’s cock. He takes it with a low moan.

By the time Brad is all the way inside he feels pierced straight to the heart.

“Next time, we’re going to fuck in the shower,” Brad says, hand tight on Nate’s hip as he drags him back onto his dick.

At least Brad accomplished what he wanted. Nate can’t think at all. Brad touches him delicately in counterpoint to the sharp deep thrusts inside his body. Nate as much as demanded this from Brad and Brad is giving it to him. It’s barely a shade away from too much and yet it’s perfect. He takes himself clumsily in hand with his left, trembling and pausing, momentarily forgetting his cock every time Brad strikes his prostate.

Brad pushes his thigh up towards his chest so he can get in tighter and Nate can only be glad of the loud rumbling of the central air, because whatever is coming out of his mouth he’s sure the entire neighborhood can hear.

Brad is grim and silent behind him, but Nate can tell from the way his hands shake on Nate’s hips, it’s because he’s putting all his effort into fucking Nate with everything he has. Nate’s right arm, crushed underneath his own body, has started to tingle to life with pins and needles. He doesn’t care. Their bodies are so slick with sweat the AC might as well be pumping out hot air and his lungs feel about as tight as they did on his run.

Brad comes first, there’s only so long someone can be expected to last when you’re doing it this way, and he seems to swell momentarily larger within Nate’s ass. He keeps driving into Nate through it all, like some kind of porn god.

Nate’s not quite there yet, and he’s not entirely sure how long Brad can keep this up, but then Brad pulls him back into that same body-contorting kiss, forcing Nate’s spine into an impossible bend in order to meet Brad’s mouth behind him. Brad’s hand on his hip unclenches and he grasps for Nate’s still tingling hand. He squeezes, crushing Nate to him in all possible ways, and just like that, Brad still somehow improbably hard inside him, he comes.

Brad groans into his mouth when Nate tightens involuntarily around him, breaking off the kiss to simply breathe into Nate’s shoulders.

“God…god…” he says dumbly.

Nate’s still coming back to himself, with his cock spent all over his left fist and Brad’s covers that they stupidly left on the bed.

“We’re going to need another shower,” Nate says and then they’re both laughing.

*

Of course one thing leads to another and they have sex two more times in the shower. By the time they’re done Nate is so hungry he could singlehandedly hunt down a buffalo and eat it himself. Of course, Brad doesn’t have anything in his cabinets.

“Perks of the job,” he says.

“What, failing at adult requirements like cooking your own meals?” he says, looking down at his cell and noticing that there isn’t any new news. He hopes that’s a good thing and the baby and Kat are both all right.

He checks the time. 8:35. The local grocery closes at 8 here.

“Am I going to die of starvation?” Nate asks. His clothing is in the wash and he cannot go to Meena’s dressed in Brad’s nylon gym shirt and sheriff’s department t-shirt. Brad rolls his eyes.

“What are our options? Chick-fil-a, White Castle, Waffle House—god I could kill for some In-N-Out right now,” he says while paging through the phone book.

“There’s a Piggly Wiggly open ‘til ten off of I-75 just out of town and if that doesn’t suit our needs I will drive us, lights flashing all the way, to Acworth,” Brad tells him, snagging him by the hips for another kiss.

They’re the only customers at the supermarket and as Nate goes along the aisles, he finds himself stocking Brad’s refrigerator like he’s his mother. Carrot sticks, greek yogurt, and whole grain bread all go into the cart along with the fixings for burgers.

“You can actually use that grill in the back, yes?” he asks, holding a bag of hamburger buns.

“What grill?”

Nate glares at him.

Brad laughs at him. “Yes, I can use that grill.”

Nate shakes his head and dumps the buns into the cart and then spends good time in the produce section finding the perfect roma tomatoes and portabello mushrooms. He bypasses the case of Miller Brad gravitates toward and picks up a six pack of Sierra Nevada instead.

“The only thing you have in the fridge is Miller and a carton of 2%.”

“Yes, yes, I know, you marvel at my ability to take care of myself. Let me tell you though, I make an excellent baked potato.”

“I am so proud at your skill in operating a microwave,” Nate replies dryly.

“Alright, feisty one, these mushrooms you’re threatening me with had better be worth it.”

They end up busting out a bag of tortilla chips in the car ride back, the jar of salsa resting in one of Brad’s cup holders. It feels natural, like they’ve been bitching at each other on grocery runs for the last ten years.

Brad grills enough to feed a small army and they stuff themselves on far too much food. The only thing souring it is that he still hasn’t heard anything about Kat. He finally gives in and texts Holly at 11:15, assuming correctly that she’ll be up.

She texts back immediately with Kat is fine. Can come home tomorrow. Baby idk.

“Of course nobody bothered to tell me,” Nate tells Brad.

Brad comes up behind him and wraps him in a hug. He doesn’t say anything—just nuzzles the side of Nate’s neck until he relaxes against him.

“This might not be the time,” Brad says, “but wanna fuck?”

Brad slides his palm over Nate’s already hardening cock. Brad rubs the stupid nylon of the basketball shorts against it and Nate can actually map the traverse of all of his blood rushing south.

He breathes out.

He did come here for a distraction.

*

Brad has to work the next day and Nate needs his own clothes, so he makes the run back to the Oddfellow while Brad’s in the shower. Deprived of Brad’s presence, his thoughts immediately turn to work. As much as Wynn can handle everything back in LA, Nate feels like a giant hole has been ripped out of him when he isn’t working. He doesn’t know how he managed sixteen whole hours without checking his email or picking up a phone call. He isn’t under any illusions that work took up the space that his family left in his life, but he’s never before had a problem with that.

Maureen says good morning and gestures at the breakfast she has set up at one side of the room when he walks in. He feels obliged to take a donut, even though he doesn’t ordinarily eat them, because he’s the Oddfellow’s only guest and so the entire spread was laid out for his benefit.

“Thanks,” he tells her, taking a big bite and having to wipe chocolate frosting out of the corner of his mouth.

She cocks her head and smiles. “You are always welcome, hon.”

She waves goodbye to him as he takes the stairs two at a time up to his room.

He has to wonder if she’s noticed he hasn’t spent a night in his hotel room in the last two days. Maybe he’s sliding by on a kind of fearsome luck. It’s all over town that Kat was in the hospital and her baby is on life support in the NICU. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t considered how irregular it must look that the former town fag is spending so much time with the beloved golden boy sheriff, but Brad doesn’t appear to be thinking about it at all. Well, he’ll be gone soon, and if Brad doesn’t care what people think, it’s his battle to fight not Nate’s, so there’s no use worrying about it.

There are two messages from Sotheby’s saying they’ve located a buyer who’s willing to take all of Emma’s furniture in a lot, but that they’re not certain if the offer is large enough for Nate’s purposes.

It’s a pretty hefty sum, despite lowballing all of the pieces’ individual value, so he calls them and tells them to pull the trigger even as they reassure him that if he’s willing to wait they could likely get a higher offer.

Nate can’t exactly explain it, but he takes a certain sort of pleasure in selling it all cheaply. It had little value to Emma and absolutely none for him. It’s spiteful of course, but he’s discovering new depths of petty emotion to sink to.

That leaves only the trunk. He sighs and pulls it away from the bed, sinking to his knees Indian-style in front of it.

Although Nate could swear he never saw Aunt Emma open it on any occasion under any circumstances, the key turns easily in the blackened iron lock. He’d always just assumed the trunk was more of a decorative prop than anything else, and while the contents smell strongly of the lavender sachets she used to make herself, it’s hardly untouched. Lifting the lid reveals well organized stacks of correspondence, as well as aged articles of clothing, and several old-fashioned photo albums.

He finds a stack as thick as his wrist of carefully folded missives tied with ribbon, the return address in the upper left corner is his own. He pages through the mountain of correspondence and realizes she must have saved every single letter he sent her. Below that is a pile of his emails to her, printed out and folded alongside the snail mail. The most recent one is only three weeks old.

He starts tearing up again and has to stop and lean back against the foot of the bed to get his bearings. He’d been telling her about Toronto in response to her demand that he slow down and take a break. If he had only known…

He can’t dwell on that. She wouldn’t want him to. She had never asked him to come back to this place after all. Unfortunately, what he knows intellectually does not stop that leaden feeling from weighing down his heart. He sighs and thumps his head back against the bed. In the mean time he’s got to sac up and deal with this trunk. He’s sure Emma would not have wanted it to be the great trauma of his life to go through it.

He carefully places the letters aside and turns to the albums. Most of the pictures are exactly what you would expect a venerable family aunt to have – portraits of family members graduating, snapshots of weddings, baby showers, and family vacations. And old cracked leather one older has pictures of his grandmother and Emma when they were young, pages divided with fine rice paper leaves to keep the photos from touching.

But there’s an old Rich’s department store dress box underneath all of that. The top fits so tightly and perfectly he has to work it off carefully to avoid ripping the ancient and fragile cardboard.

He finds another pile of letters inside, yellowing and dark with age layered alongside a few scallop-edged black & white 4x6s. The first one shows Emma standing against a pasture fence, a bicycle leaning next to her, as she turns to look back at the photographer. It’s a good shot, her mouth darkened glamorously with lipstick and her hair perfectly in place. She looks happy and carefree—a word he never would’ve associated with her, especially when all the other photos he’s seen of her at the same age she looks so quiet and subdued.

The next photo is worn, the edges crinkled like it had been well-thumbed. It’s a studio portrait, unlike the last, of a tall blond young man in a military uniform with a peaked cap, a single chevron on his shoulder. Nate wouldn’t have had any idea of who he was looking at if the rakehell grin hadn’t been so familiar.

Aunt Emma kept a portrait of Brad’s grandfather, Clifford, in her trunk.

*

Brad finds him several hours later, surrounded in his aunt’s young adult life, perusing a letter dated 1941.

“Whoa,” Brad says, avoiding the letters that Nate has organized by date across the floor. “You weren’t answering your phone.”

Nate looks up and realizes that the sun is hanging low in the sky and long shadows stretch across the floor. He barely noticed the passage of time.

“Did you know my aunt and your grandfather were in love?” he asks.

Brad freezes. “What?”

“It looks like it started in high school,” Nate clarifies, sifting through some papers to pull out the relevant letters. “They didn’t start writing the letters until my aunt went away for the summer, but then I have a letter from him dating nearly every day. It stopped when they must’ve returned to school in the fall and then picks up again the next summer.”

“I don’t…” Brad blinks. “I had no idea.”

Nate hands him a picture of the two on the beach sitting on a blanket in bathing suits, a picnic lunch spread between them, faces brightened by sun.

“I think they tried to run away together and get married in Atlanta, but my great-grandfather found out and dragged Aunt Emma back.”

“When was this?” Brad asks, gingerly settling himself at Nate’s side.

“Right before Pearl Harbor,” Nate replies. “Your grandfather enlisted in the marines after that. He wrote to Emma almost every day while he was deployed. She must not have sent him a single letter back, because he mentions not knowing if she even sees them several times.”

“She kept each one,” Brad says, glancing over his grandfather’s rushed cursive.

Nate nods. “I think it’s why she never married.”

Brad shakes his head. “You know, my grandfather hated your grandmother. Hated her. I grew up hearing about the Ficks on their hoity-toity mountain. I guess I never really thought about why, because, well…”

Nate laughs. “Because she’s a pain in the ass?”

“To put it mildly,” Brad replies.

“I don’t think they approved of your grandfather. Emma didn’t leave behind any diaries, so I don’t know her side of things, but I don’t think she ever forgave herself for giving in to them.” Nate sets the 1941 letter down. “It’s sad, really.”

They stay silent, staring at the hundreds of letters carefully arrayed as the shadows sneak inexorably closer across the floor, until Nate’s stomach growls loudly and insistently.

Brad hooks Nate’s hand with his and brushes a kiss across Nate’s cheek. “Let me take you to dinner in Marietta. There’s a good Thai place.”

*

Nate asks Brad about coming back to Twelve Oaks over Pad Thai and Tom Yum in the low atmospheric lighting. The restaurant is full, but quiet, and Chopin is playing on the loudspeakers. It all seems very proper, especially for hole-in-the-wall Thai.

“My dad got diagnosed with lung cancer my senior year of college about two months before graduation. There was nobody to take care of him – my mother split when I was five.”

Nate nods. Everybody in town knows that story. Tom Colbert’s Yankee bride running off on her husband and kid—she may as well have joined the circus the way it was talked about. Brad was raised by his father and uncles and grandfather—Emma used to say the legion of men raising Brad was probably why he was so wild.

“There was no money—I only got through Notre Dame after my football scholarship was taken away because I got a technology grant and my grandfather had left me a little money. My dad was so in debt, the house was mortgaged to the hilt. I had a job lined up with Lockheed, but I had to give that up because there was no way to care for him. I guess I always thought I’d be able to leave after he passed, but the tough old bastard held on forever, and by then I’d been elected county sheriff.”

The words are callous, but Brad says it with a kind of reverence that tells Nate, in spite of everything, he undoubtedly admired his father. Brad smiles self-deprecatingly and shrugs, ducking his eyes. “That’s my story.”

“That’s not even half of the story. I’m assuming you took a job with the sheriff’s department because it was the only place with paying work…” Nate says waiting for Brad’s nod. “But that doesn’t tell me how you became the sheriff.”

Brad gives him a sheepish sigh. “The sheriff when I started, Schwetje, was a complete moron. Cases were getting mismanaged left and right—it’s not East Compton out here, but he was managing to turn it into a warzone. Ray used to call him Encino Man after that shitty movie from when we were kids.”

“I didn’t know,” Nate says. Perhaps Emma and his family hadn’t even been aware of it. They’d always been a little blind to what was beyond their doorstep. It was almost as if the world ended at the town line, and places like Atlanta made occasional intrusions into their consciousness.

Brad takes a big gulp of his wine and shrugs again. “After that, it seemed like the thing to do. So I ran and I beat him.”

Nate’s unsure what to say. He knows Brad won’t accept any kind of sympathy or admiration. He doesn’t see it as either sympathetic or admirable, so he won’t understand if Nate does.

“Who ran your campaign?” he asks instead.

Brad leans back in his chair and raises his brows.

Nate’s impressed that Brad did the whole thing himself. Even if it was only a county sheriff’s election, local politics could be just as backbiting and strange as on the hill. He’d had to step into enough local races to know. “You didn’t get Ray to do it?”

Brad snorts. “I wanted to win, not go down like the Hindenburg.”

Nate chuckles. “You don’t give him enough credit.”

“You just see the best in everybody.”

“What?” Nate is completely shocked by this assessment. “No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” Brad replies, leaning in close again. “Why would you do what you do for these rich assholes otherwise? You think, even though they get themselves in trouble and make mistakes, they can still do good in the world. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I never saw any good in my father,” Nate says, bleakly.

“That’s because you and your sisters were the good in him.” He says this completely unashamed of the sentimentality of it.

A busboy comes and refills their waters before Nate can respond and when he leaves again, Brad grins at him, taking the victory and changing the subject to Ray’s more colorful transgressions so that he can’t debate him on it.

As they walk back to the car after Brad steals the check from Nate, Nate realizes he should probably book a flight back to Los Angeles. He’s dealt with the trunk and the furniture—as soon as he sees Kat, they’ll be nothing left keeping him here. Murray even had some teenager he’d been subjugating for very little pay in his garage drop Nate’s stupid rental back at the Oddfellow.

Brad, his longer stride carrying him ahead, smiles at him over his shoulder as he unlocks the door on the driver’s side. Nate feels an acute and inexplicable pain in his chest. He doesn’t want this to be over.

*

Nate swears to himself he’s going to answer some emails and check some things off of his to-do list once they get back to Brad’s little place, but of course that doesn’t end up happening.

They make it to the floor just south of Brad’s bed—somehow unable to even hold out for the last few feet. Nate’s doesn’t even remember the trip from the door to here. It’s like being seventeen again. The thought crosses his mind that his back is going to kill him for it later.

Brad picks himself up off of Nate to sit back on his heels and Nate can’t help a self-deprecating laugh as he shrugs himself up onto his elbows. “This is ridiculous.”

Brad cocks a quizzical brow, but he smiles.

“Ridiculous works for me.” He unzips Nate’s fly as Nate’s trying to sit himself up, but he gives up when Brad pulls him free of the fabric of his boxers.

“I was a fuckhead in college—used to think it would make me less of a man if I blew a guy,” he says, mouth hovering over Nate’s erection.

“That’s not uncommon,” Nate offers, voice threadbare, fingers curling in the carpet. He realizes that Brad’s attempting to tell him that he hasn’t done this a lot, but Brad’s a guy, he should know there’s no magic blowjob skill that’s going to make it or break it for Nate. “I’m not going to cry if you’re not into it.”

Brad watches him as he takes the head of his cock into his mouth. He sucks tight and hard and tries to take as much of Nate into his mouth as he can. It’s good, but more than anything it’s the sight of his cock catching on Brad’s lower lip that’s got him so desperate to come.

Brad’s hand is big enough that when he grips the base of Nate’s cock, his mouth easily meets it. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be so easy for him to come, especially not from a blowjob, but Brad’s skillful grip on him in combination with the tongue he keeps dragging around and around the sensitive crown of his dick makes his thighs tremble.

“You should…” Nate tries to tell him to pull off, but then Brad dips a finger down his perineum to push very lightly at his hole and Nate comes before he can get the warning out.

Brad swallows, although the look on his face after makes Nate crack up.

“Go rinse your mouth out,” he instructs, hiding a smile.

By the time that Brad has come back, Nate’s kicked off his pants and started opening himself up on the bed. Brad immediately rushes to get his jeans and t-shirt off, nearly tripping in his haste to get his legs free. “You got started without me.”

Nate scissors his fingers and moans. He’s not trying to put on a show, but it’s hard not to throw his head back and picture what it’s going to be like when Brad first pushes inside.

“Can you sit against the headboard,” Nate asks. His dick is still soft, but it’s beginning to swell. Brad’s cock is hard and red, pre-come already pearling at the tip. Brad obliges him. He finds the condom Nate set out on the headboard and puts it on, slicking it up with a quick jet of lube and a muttered curse when his hand tightens over his own erection. Nate gives himself another moment and then moves to straddle his lap, positioning Brad at his entrance. He shouldn’t be able to get away with so little prep, but they’ve been fucking so much over the last couple of days, his body has adjusted.

Brad stays perfectly still as Nate bears down on him, but he drops his chin to his chest and breathes out.

His eyes pop open when Nate bottoms out, pierced to the core on Brad’s cock and Nate has to kiss him—it’s as inexorable and required as drawing breath for air.

It’s a good position, his cock riding the ridge between Brad’s perfect abdominals while he fucks himself back on Brad’s dick.

Sweat runs down his throat and Brad leans in to tongue it off his skin.

“I can’t imagine anything being more perfect than this…” he says.

“Don’t,” Nate replies, broken. He doesn’t want to think about it. He has to leave in a few days. Twelve Oaks is a world that has no place in his own life.

Brad catches Nate’s wrists behind his back, crossing them together in a one-handed grip Nate can’t break. He tugs experimentally and Nate has to choke back a curse when it pushes Brad even deeper inside of him. Brad does it again, drawing his spine into an almost painful curving arc.

“Brad,” he whispers, because it’s slightly too much.

“Shh.” Brad kisses his throat, lips soft on the thin skin in counterpoint with the pitiless snap of his hips. As usual, Brad knows exactly what he needs.

It’s vicious—a flawless massacre of his defenses and he comes without a hand on his cock. Brad spits out several epithets in a row and lets go of his wrists, rolling Nate underneath him. He slows, still sliding deep, but not quite so punishing.

Nate holds him close, wrapping himself tight around Brad, spent and wrung out though he is. His wrists, visible over Brad’s shoulders are puffy and red. He pushes against the swelling, the sweet sting of pain rushing all the way up his arms before hitting his brain like a rush of nicotine.

Nate’s sore. They’ve been doing this too often. A part of him has had too much and wants Brad to come already, but the small lost part of him who feels moored again every time Brad touches him, is unable to let go so easily.

When Brad finally orgasms, face pressed to Nate’s neck, he realizes there are tears at the corner of his eyes.

The honest truth is he can’t imagine anything more perfect either.

*

Nate wakes up early and while Brad is still sleeping he goes for another run. The morning air holds just a hint of the muggy heat that threatens to come later in the day. He doesn’t feel like he’s dying by the time he circles back to Brad’s house—hard to know if that’s because he’s getting used to the swamp-like humidity or not.

Brad slips into the shower with him while he’s shampooing his hair.

When he gets out and finally checks his cell-phone things have blown up at work—a cluster-fuck about some celebrity, a non-disclosure agreement, and their health information. So much for being able to handle things at the office without him. Most of his people have sent him various all-caps emails that would probably be accompanied by large red exclamation points if he was still using Outlook.

“What is it?” Brad asks when he catches Nate rubbing at his forehead with the heel of his palm.

Nate shakes his head. “Can’t say, but shit hit the fan.”

He calls Wynn up over a quick breakfast. “Mike, can you book me on a flight home when you get a chance? I think I’ve wrapped everything up over here.”

Brad doesn’t even pause in eating his cereal. Nate looks away and doesn’t think about it. He hadn’t expected anything more out of him—their complete refusal to mention any form of metaphorical tomorrow between them had said it all. And what is Nate going to do? Remain in this place where people have to find it in themselves to tolerate him and he’s always balancing on some fraught tightrope with his family members. He’d been glad of this—sex, good sex, had been too long in the offing—and now he has to go.

Mike’s clearly relieved that Nate’s returning, though he’s careful not to show it.

“I’ll try to take care of what I can over here,” Nate tells him, before giving him a list of things to do in the meantime.

He rinses out their cereal bowls afterwards and when he looks back over his shoulder at Brad, who’s still sitting at the table drinking his coffee, Brad smiles at him. Nate smiles back, but finds himself immediately having to look away again.

He wants to say something, anything, but the only thing echoing through his head is “We’ll always have Paris,” so he remains silent rather than commit that inanity to the air.

Barely fifteen minutes later his phone beeps in notification for his red-eye flight reservation back home.

“Do you need me to take you to the airport?” Brad asks.

“I have the rental,” Nate replies.

“Right, the Lexus,” Brad answers.

Indeed. The hated Lexus.

As far as goodbye’s go, theirs is definitely lacking.

*

Kat’s subdued, but surprisingly cheerful when he goes to visit her. She still looks not entirely well, with dark circles under her eyes and limp hair, but Tom has to keep reminding her to take it easy as she putters about giving him a tour.

It’s his first time in their house. It’s a total showplace, but when they head back to the garden, they pass the nursery and Nate can see the love and care that was put into it. It makes him sad for her, for their little baby hooked up to a rack of wires that might not make it through the coming weeks.

And somehow, crazily, with seemingly complete lack of awareness that she nearly died, she asks him over glasses of mint lemonade, “How are you doing?”

Nate has to give it to his grandmother. She raised them all to have stiff upper lip of stone and steel in their spine to spare.

“I’m good—I wouldn’t head out so soon, especially as you just got home, but work…” he trails off, letting his silence do the talking.

Kat nods. “I miss work right now.”

Everybody who’s ever looked spoken to her knows she hates the Real Estate agency she works at. He’s frankly surprised they haven’t heard about it and fired her, given the way she’s complained to the entire town. She laughs at the look on his face.

“I know, it’s crazy,” she says wistfully, hand on her belly. Tom reaches over to hold her hand and she smiles at him before turning back to Nate. “It would be nice to have the routine right now.”

Nate can understand that probably better than anybody.

“Would you come visit me?” he finds himself saying.

“What?”

“You and Tom and the baby should come out and visit me,” he says.

She stares at him and he does his best to smile back. Tom looks back and forth between them, awkward and unable to say anything. Nate supposes that’s where his grandmother gets her ‘no account toady’ description. But he’s supportive, if apparently useless, and Nate will never forget him putting his grandmother so soundly in her place. Certainly none of them have ever attempted it.

“I never…thought you wanted me there,” Kat says.

“Why would you think that?” he furrows his brow.

“Oh it’s stupid,” she says, “I know you have good reasons for not coming back, but I always kind of wondered if when you left, you meant to be done with every single one of us.”

“You think I would’ve ever accepted Holly’s Facebook requests if I meant to be done with you guys? She writes on my wall so often I had to turn notifications off, but I always write back.”

Kat looks down at her hands helplessly. “Everything was such a mess after you left,” she says. “I don’t think I ever understood how rough you had it until suddenly I was the oldest one, the center of attention. I felt bad, for not trying to make it easier on you.”

“Kat,” he says, astonished, “I didn’t leave for any other reason than that it became perfectly clear that who I was, who I wanted to be, who I would always be, would not be allowed at the dinner table.”

She doesn’t look up from her knotted fists.

“I love you, you’re my sister, and I want you to come visit me,” he says warmly, “now chin up and give me some more of that lemonade.”

Kat laughs, slightly congested from the tears that she’s not allowing to fall, but she looks up finally and says, “Tom’s the one who makes it.”

Nate catches his brother-in-law’s eye. “Well then, Tom?”

The rest of the visit is good. She tells him about the landscaping they’re doing on the yard, how Aunt Emma left her the house and maybe she and Tom we’ll be able to start their own real estate business if the sale goes well, the latest updates on the baby.

“She’s coming home,” Kat says fiercely and Nate can only nod.

“Did you know about Aunt Emma and Clifford Colbert?” he asks, changing the subject.

“Sheriff Colbert’s grandfather?” she asks, “What’s there to know?”

“They ran off and tried to get married,” he says.

“No…Emma? Married? The thought of her and another man, let alone a Colbert, is totally crazy.”

He shakes his head. “Apparently, not. She left me his letters. There were hundreds of them.”

“So what happened?” She leans forward in her seat, intrigued.

“Same old, same old. Family didn’t approve.”

Kat sighs and settles back in her chair, watching Tom water the plants with the garden hose. “I wonder if Gramma ever gets tired of being upset about things.”

Nate snorts and Kat laughs.

“What?” Tom asks, “what’s funny?”

“Nothing honey,” she tells him, giving him a sunny smile.

Eventually they have to call it quits because the medication they’ve got Kat on makes her drowsy and she’s not supposed to be moving about as much as she has been. Tom points this out in the middle of slicing more lemons for lemonade, because they’ve managed to drink through two whole pitchers.

Kat grumbles and shuffles off to bed after Nate extracts a promise for her to come visit in late September when it’ll have cooled down from the summer highs and the baby will be at a good age to travel. He surprises himself with his own fierceness in that regard. That baby is going to come home. It doesn’t matter what the doctor’s say, they all know it. He leaves on that note and Tom shakes his hand and doesn’t make too much fun of the Lexus as Nate walks down the drive, electric key in his hand.

“What is it with people and this car?” he asks out loud.

*

He visits his mother next. It’s like a laundry list, checking off one female family member after another. Except for Gracie. He isn’t going anywhere near that side of the family.

She’s on the back porch arranging great piles of her roses into an army of vases. “I had to improvise after the golf club,” she says, softly. “They weren’t really happy anymore, all battered about.”

“Of course,” he says.

There’s a whoop from the pool—Holly and a few of her friends kicking around on floaties, generally being loud and exuberant teenagers. When Holly sees him with their mother on the back porch she hauls herself out of the pool to give him a hug that leaves his entire front wet. She’s wearing a tiny one-piece that has the sides cut out and will probably give her the most ridiculous tan if she wears it too much.

“What are you smiling about” she asks.

“Thanks for giving me a chlorinated shower,” he says, pulling his wet shirt away from his chest.

She ignores this.

“I got a text from Kat saying you invited her to LA,” she says. “I want to go.”

“Maybe if you can pay for your own flight, young lady,” his mother says tartly, unamused by the trail of wet foot prints she’s left on the old white floor boards. Holly just shrugs and runs back toward the pool, water dripping everywhere the whole way, her friends calling her name.

“I have two polite children, I suppose three would be greedy,” his mother says with a sigh, watching her youngest cannonball into the pool. “Thank you for coming to see me.”

“Of course,” Nate says, his mouth is dry, but his tone somehow remains even.

“We heard you sold the furniture,” she says, by way of keeping the conversation going. It’s been too long and he fears it’ll never be easy between them, but he’s glad that she’s trying. That was more than he’d been lead to hope.

“I did,” he says, inflectionless, waiting for her reaction.

She starts laughing. “You should’ve seen Adele’s face and over those ugly things too.”

Nate rolls his eyes. “I can imagine.”

“Don’t roll your eyes, young man,” she says, pointing gravely at him with a gorgeous rose on the verge of being past its bloom.

“She being nice to you, mom?” Nate asks.

His mother shrugs. “She let’s me live in the house I shared with your father for 26 years. The garden’s all mine to do whatever I like with. Of course she’s not being nice, when has she ever been? I took her baby boy away from her, but I’m grateful for what I have.”

It’s so paltry and wretched, Nate almost wants to cry. The garden? Letting her stay in the house she owned herself. His father and grandmother had Stockholm syndromed his mother pretty good. And worse, they’d done it without anybody even realizing something was wrong.

“It’s a good thing you left,” she says suddenly.

Nate looks at her, surprised and hurt.

“He would’ve made you leave sooner or later, better you got out on your own terms,” she says, meaning his father. “And it made Beau happy. Now his sons are going to be running the company like he always wanted.”

He almost has to laugh. Thank god he left, at least Jack and Charlie aren’t making trouble. God this family, but he sees it for the peace offering it is. She couldn’t protect him. Wouldn’t might be a better word, but to her mind, she couldn’t. He’s always known that and he’s done his best to forgive her for it. Even as he thinks back to the old days when he hoped against hope that she would show up in that little hovel he lived in in St. Louis, enveloping him in smell of Chanel Gardenias she always carried with her, promising to spirit him back home where things would be easy again.

Of course they never were easy. The great lie of his life. There was no moment where everything was coasting along fine and then in shock and awe, his life had come off the rails. He didn’t get caught. He’d been far too busy being good, trying to be the perfect son. Of course the real perfect child wouldn’t have had to try. His parents had always known about him, as little as they had wished to see it. There had always been the smell of rot beneath the roses.

“It’s good to see you, mom,” he says, giving her a kiss. She smiles at him, but she doesn’t move from her roses to see him out the front door. He supposes that must just be easier for her and the only thing he can do is let it go.

When his grandmother snubs him in the hall, all he’s got left for her is a smile at her ridiculousness.

*

Walt pulls up in front of the Oddfellow while Nate’s stowing his things in the trunk of the rental. Nate sees the cruiser and his heart rises, assuming for one short moment that it’s Brad come to wish him a better goodbye than that bitterly awkward dance this morning. But Walt’s the one who gets out of the car.

“Brad says he found this,” Walt tells him, handing over an expensive fountain pen that his mentor, Senator McKaskill, gave him. He must have left it at Brad’s when he was trying to catch up on work. The pen says nothing and Nate could’ve left it anywhere that Brad could’ve picked it up, but Nate can tell from Walt’s expression that he knows.

Walt smiles at him nevertheless. “He’d have brought it himself, but Cheryl-Lee’s at it again.”

Nate summons up a smile. “Won’t he need you to protect him from inappropriate come-ons?”

Walt shrugs. “He’ll manage.”

“Well, thank you for bringing it to me,” Nate says, tucking it into his briefcase.

“You’re welcome,” Walt tells him awkwardly, cheeks pinkening into a blush. “You’re one of the good ones, you know?”

“Thank you,” he says again, and Walt’s blush just deepens further.

It’s altogether charming and Nate only just stops himself from saying as much.

“See you around.” Walt waves and heads back to his car. Maybe that’s just the way of it around here, everybody acting like he’s just going on a business trip rather than planning never to return. He wouldn’t know. The last time he left he’d avoided the whole concept of goodbyes altogether. He’s reminded of the appeal.

His flight’s not for several hours, but he’s leaving this early anyway. He’s not sure what he would do with himself around town anyway—loiter at the Sweetwater, make fun of Ray, try hard not to think of Brad fucking him over every available surface. As Walt waves at him and pulls off in a cloud of exhaust, Nate decides it is just too fucking much.

He gets in the car, turns up the AC as high as it will go, and he calls Brad. It clicks over to voicemail immediately, but Nate’s not going to read into that. Walt did tell him Cheryl-Lee was causing trouble again, after all. There’s something easier about leaving a voicemail anyway, he knows exactly what he’s going to say and he doesn’t have to plan for any interruptions or what-ifs from Brad.

“I was thinking,” he says into the phone after the sound of the tone. “I’m not ready for this to be over. You are, frankly, the best thing that’s happened to me, and at this stage in my life I find that I’m unwilling to give that up. I have to go, but I want you to come with me.”

He pauses, swallowing deeply.

Traffic crawls by, people are out taking their evening strolls now that it’s finally cooling down, and nobody has any idea that he’s spilling his guts to their sheriff. They barely even register him sitting in the car, engine burning up good gas, with a phone to his ear.

“I love you. I don’t know how after only five days. But I love you.”

He takes a deep breath and hangs up.

The drive to the airport is uneventful. He’s able to drop the car off with minimal hassle even if they do charge him up the ass for driving it so many miles outside of his rental agreement. By the time he’s check in, there’s still nothing on the phone.

He waits in the Red Carpet Club for three hours, sipping cranberry juice and smoothing ruffled feathers as best as he can without laying down the law in person. His phone gets notifications occasionally, a facebook poke from Holly, three million ‘o God save me’s from his staff, an email about some documents to wrap up Emma’s estate from Ray, nothing from the person he’s actually waiting for.

Maybe he’ll just have to get used to the idea that silence is Brad’s answer.

Finally, as he’s sitting in his seat in business class, getting ready to turn off his phone and giving the whole thing up for a lost cause, a text finally comes in.

‘Yes,’ is all it says.

And a moment later, ‘it’s mutual.’

He wants to press his hand to heart like a maiden aunt. Or kiss the magnificent anti-glare screen of his iPhone. He doesn’t do either of these things, because the hipster girl sitting next to him says, “You should turn your phone off before they yell at you.”

She’s got a hideous old t-shirt on, a thrift shop discovery he figures, with the peeling plastic letters ‘I left my heart in Georgia’ in block capitals across her chest.

“Indeed,” he says, as he switches it off.

*