Shades of Henry (The Flophouse Book 1) Page 6

  “You can’t do that,” Henry said, his throat so tight, he almost couldn’t talk. “You putting out—that’s not a condition of a relationship, Cotton. That’s….” What did he want it to be? “That’s like, your reward for letting the rest of the relationship work. I mean, I get it. Some people hook up and they walk away and that’s okay for them.” Martin—wasn’t that his name? Martin had been a prime example. “But not everyone is built like that. I don’t think you’re built like that. I just….” Henry blew out a breath, because God knows, his adult decisions hadn’t been any more awesome than this kid’s. “I just think it would be kinder to yourself if you kept the sex on set for a while, and decided what you wanted for yourself when you’re not there.”

  Cotton swallowed, looking smaller and smaller in his corner. Oh Jesus. Once again, he wanted to call Lance, and then he saw the kid wipe his face with his sleeve.

  “Look, Cotton—if I come sit next to you, do you promise not to come on to me?”

  The kid took one of those deep shuddering sob breaths and nodded, and Henry did what he promised. Sat next to him. Warm and safe.

  Cotton put his head on Henry’s shoulder and cried. Not racking sobs—silent, cleansing tears. Eventually, he slid down Henry’s arm, falling asleep, his head on the pillow, and Henry covered him with the yellow-and-green crocheted blanket at the foot of Lance’s bed. He emerged from the room to find the dishes done—he’d insisted somebody do them after dinner, because yuck!—and the living room surprisingly empty. Lance was reading under the lamp at the end of the couch.

  “Where is everybody?” Henry asked, looking around.

  “Well, Zep and Fisher were going to sleep, for once,” Lance said, “so Randy asked if he could spoon with them. Curtis is in there doing homework. Billy is staying at a friend’s house—”

  “A friend?”

  “Apparently so. There was nothing about a hookup in his voice. Old high school buddy. And you sort of took my bed.”

  Henry made a sad-clown-horn sort of sound. “And the answer to whether or not Lance gets his bed back is….”

  “No!” Lance filled in, laughing softly. “I get it.”

  “You can sleep on Randy’s bed,” Henry offered blandly, and Lance’s look of horror reassured him.

  “Only if I’m into pain. His sheets are so stiff, they’d cut my skin.”

  “God, that kid’s lucky he doesn’t get scabs on his penis. For God’s sake, that thing’s like the Energizer Bunny of dicks!”

  Lance had to hold his hand in front of his mouth, he was laughing so hard. When he calmed down, he dropped his hand and said, “You shit! All the kids are asleep for once and nobody’s having sex! God, don’t make me wake anybody up!”

  Henry gave one more chuckle. “Sure. You can have the air mattress. Do you have to be anywhere tomorrow?” Lance had classes sometimes—in-services, Henry supposed, not knowing what the doctor term for it was—and meetings all the time. It was hard for Henry to keep them all straight.

  “Well, yes, but only because I want to,” Lance said cheerfully. “Have you met Reg yet?”

  Henry nodded. He’d been to the Johnnies main office several times. He’d never been invited to the back suites, where the offices were made to look like bedrooms and the filming happened during business hours, but he’d been back there on occasion to make repairs. And he had dropped Galen or Davy off in the front on several occasions. That’s when he’d met John’s shy promotions director.

  And had wondered about him, a lot.

  Reg wasn’t pretty, or at least as pretty as the other guys. He was, in fact, pretty average, although his body looked like he took care of it. His hair was getting a little thin on top, so he kept it buzzed short, and his cheekbones weren’t razor perfection. He had an amazingly sweet smile, and while Henry had noticed that he wasn’t quick on the uptake—he’d needed to be reminded of who Henry was more than once—he was very good about asking questions from the people around him. Reg wouldn’t have made it in the military, he was just not quick enough, and from what he’d let drop, he’d spent several years in porn.

  Until this night, right now, Henry had been sort of pissed off about that. Who had let this guy—this not-so-bright, super sweet guy—spend his twenties giving it up for anyone who looked good on camera?

  But Reg talked about trying to fix a house and trying to keep a car, and about how any job he could have gotten out of high school wouldn’t have let him do that. And Cotton—that kid couldn’t work six days a week in food service, with people yelling at him. He’d be a wreck.

  Sure, there were better ideas—but you usually needed connections to get you that job, and these guys were barely connected to their own shoes.

  Henry was beginning to get a picture of a very different world than the one he’d assumed existed, where gay men were the same as sex perverts and porn stars were degenerate drug abusers. These were his father’s ideas—these were the thing he’d said loudly about Davy the minute Davy left. These were the ideas Henry had littering his brain from the minute Mal had kissed him, laughed in his ear, and shoved his hand down Henry’s pants, when they were sixteen.

  But he was starting to see that sex was very different than he’d been raised to believe. He was almost as horrified as he was surprised.

  That didn’t stop a part of him from thinking sex should be sacred.

  “Have you met Reg’s boyfriend, Bobby?” Lance asked, breaking into his thoughts.

  “No, not yet, but Reg said he was looking to hook me up with a construction job.”

  “Well, he’s about six-three, and built like a tank. Like maybe three-hundred pounds of chest with a thirty-inch waist. It’s insane.”

  Suddenly Henry remembered one pertinent bit of information that Reg had dropped about his boyfriend, and he knew a brilliant shade of magenta was washing up from his neck.

  Lance chortled. “Reg told you Bobby’s got a ten-inch dick, didn’t he?”

  Henry buried his face in his hands. “Yes!” he wailed. “Why did I have to know that?”

  “Because, my brother, you would have wondered, and now you don’t have to. Reg is doing you a service. I’ve filmed scenes with him—it might even be eleven inches, but the kid doesn’t like to brag.”

  Henry felt his grin break free before the full import of what Lance said hit. “Scenes…,” he choked, and Lance looked away, obviously embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry. I… we’ve been trying not to mention that in front of you. You get all weird, and the guys get weird, and… you know. You seem to be fitting in okay. And now I had to go—”

  “Forget about it,” Henry said, waving his hand and ignoring the hollowness in his chest. “It’s just… weird. To think you were… whatever. Why are you telling me about Reg and Bobby?” His throat ached, like it did when he was trying not to cry, and he was a little appalled. What was wrong with him? Why did the thought of Lance with some Panzer tank with an eleven-inch johnson freak him out so badly?

  “Oh!” Lance sounded as desperate for a different subject as Henry was. “Yeah! Because Bobby’s foreman has a boat. The guy offered to take Bobby and some friends out on the river, and Bobby picked Reg of course, but I got the invite too, so, well, it’s my day off and I’m not spending it catching up on my med journals, and that’s pretty damned exciting.”

  Henry was genuinely happy for him. “You work too hard,” he said, leaning sideways against the couch and wrapping his arms around his knees. “You totally deserve it.”

  Lance put down his medical journal and turned to mirror Henry’s pose. They were facing each other from across the couch, and Henry suddenly realized how intimate this conversation was, in the living room at night, the only two people awake in the house.

  “Well, you deserve a medal for falling on the Cotton grenade tonight,” Lance said with admiration, and then he sobered. “Did your dad really take a strap to you and Dex when you were kids?”

  “Yeah,” Henry said, not sure when that
had become a secret. “But, you know, not randomly. Only when we were dumbasses. Didn’t your parents spank you when you were a kid?”

  “Only when we wandered into traffic,” Lance said, his brow still furrowed. “And that’s the truth. Only time I saw my little sister get spanked was when she jerked away from my mom’s hand to get something in the street. Mom must have been terrified, but Morgaine never did it again.”

  “My youngest brother, Sean, fell in a creek on a family hike once.” Henry remembered that day, him being the good little soldier, just behind his mom, thinking that Davy was going to get in trouble. “Dad wasn’t even there. If Davy hadn’t done that thing he does, running around in back to check on everybody in line, Sean would have drowned. So we get back from the hike, and Davy and Sean are wet and covered in mud, and he’s got blisters because he carried Sean back the whole way. And what does Dad do? He gives Sean a solid ass-spanking for poking around in the creek and not being where he should be.”

  “Harsh,” Lance murmured.

  “You think so?” Henry shook his head. “’Cause Davy got the belt for wrecking the new leather boots he’d worn when Mom had told him to wear the crappy ones he’d grown out of.”

  Lance made a hurt sound. “That’s not a lot of incentive to do the right thing.”

  Henry nodded, his throat tight. “That’s why I joined the Army,” he said, wishing this didn’t hurt so much. “Because I thought, hey, being a soldier, all you gotta do to do the right thing is follow orders.”

  “Mm. How’d that work for you?”

  Henry tried a tight smile, but judging by Lance’s continued wide-eyed sober look, it didn’t work that well. “Not so much.”

  “Why not?”

  Henry took a deep breath, one that shuddered on its way out. “Would you like a beer? I’d like a beer—”

  “C’mon, Henry, who’s it going to hurt?”

  Henry closed his eyes and stopped trying to get off the couch. “Me.”

  “Can it feel any worse telling me than keeping it inside?”

  “I didn’t even tell David.” That hurt. He’d been there for more than a month. It was what? Mid-May? He’d had dinner with his brother at least once a week, played with Frances, pretended not to enjoy the assortment of snakes, turtles, and iguanas that lived in their house and backyard, and rolled his eyes at Kane every chance he got so he could feel just a little bit like the person he was hadn’t been left behind completely. But he hadn’t talked about why he was there, and Davy hadn’t asked. Maybe Travis had called him—their older brother still got Christmas cards and called Davy every month or so, and he didn’t care if Mom and Dad knew it. But David was still waiting for Henry, and Henry appreciated that, but it also got scarier every day he stayed.

  “Tell me,” Lance urged. “If things go south, you can pick up and leave again, but we’d miss you. And if I keep this confidential, just you and me, and we keep going, every day, like we’ve been, you’ll be one step closer to knowing it’s okay.”

  Henry regarded him soberly for a moment. “You already know about me,” he said, his chest contracting. “You know my brother, you know the Army kicked me out, which means I failed at life. What about you? You appear to be winning at life, but I don’t understand….” Oh hell. No, Henry, don’t open up that cup of porn worms!

  “Because,” Lance said, not flinching. “Because my whole life, I was told I was important. I could be anything. I could fly. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew how my parents voted. They didn’t go to church often, but I knew what the church said about people like me. So I was twelve, and I realized exactly who I was, and I was pretty sure Mom and Dad weren’t going to be so excited about that. They’d given money to the local pray-the-gay-away place.”

  Henry closed his eyes. “My dad actually said he should have sent Davy there when he was a kid. He thought him and the neighbor kid were too close.”

  “Well, they were super excited about this place in Nevada—said it was God’s answer to all the bad homosexuality in the world.”

  “I wish,” Henry muttered, really wishing this wasn’t a part of him.

  “I don’t,” Lance said, and his voice grew low, vicious, and gleeful. “I had to hide it—I had to hide it. I buried myself in schoolwork, hid my porn, beat off like a motherfucker. I probably gave Randy a run for his money in my senior year. I’m not even ashamed. And I held it. I held it through my first seven years of school. God, I was so close to my internship, it was like I could smell a paycheck.”

  “What happened?” Henry asked, fascinated. He never saw Lance like this—never saw him angry, or bitter, or impassioned. The man he’d learned to appreciate was usually smiling, always compassionate, gentle as a… well, a doctor, with the hormonally insane adult children they were sharing an apartment with.

  “I had a boyfriend at the time—a doctor. Nice guy. My….” Lance swallowed. “My first, really. First lover, first love. And we were out for dinner, good restaurant, wine. He put his hand on top of mine and told me he was already married but he’d like to put me up in an apartment so he could pay my way through med school.”

  Henry shot bolt upright. “What. An. Asshole!”

  Lance gave a bitter laugh. “You think? So did I. I stormed out—and ran right into my parents, who were there with some work friends of my father. And there was Teddy, right behind me, yelling, ‘Galahad, I hate to lose you!’”

  Henry’s brain trainwrecked. “Galahad?”

  Lance’s cheeks colored. “Swear to Christ, it’s my real name.”

  Galahad, Lancelot—Henry got it, and he managed a grin in full bloom. “Suits you.”

  Lance snorted. “So would Gawain, but nobody can pronounce it.”

  But that’s not what the story was about. “What did your parents do?” Henry asked, and even though he had a pretty good idea, given where Lance was now, he wanted it to be a happy ending. Lance was such a good guy, a good person.

  “They looked at me, and their faces grew shock white, I swear to God, even my mother, who’s Filipino. And they looked at Teddy’s hand on my arm, and then at me. And my father says, ‘We’ll discuss this at home tonight.’ I was living on the other side of town in a dorm, so I knew that was bad.” He let out a sigh. “Gotta hand it to Teddy, though. I mean, we were broken up—that was over. But he followed me to my folks’ house and helped me get all my stuff after the throw down.”

  “How bad was the throw down?” Henry was dying to know. He’d carried his bruises for weeks.

  Lance caught his eyes directly. “Not nearly as bad as yours. They yelled, they cried, and I just stood there. I wasn’t even surprised. I….” He swallowed and looked away, some of his composure slipping. “I didn’t think so anyway. I… me and Teddy moved all my shit out to our cars, so we could get it to the dorms, anyway, and I cried all the way back.”

  “Have you talked to them since?” Henry asked, and Lance shook his head, killing a hope Henry hadn’t known he’d had.

  “My sister—she’s in law school. We still talk, have lunch sometimes, text once a week. She says….” He shrugged. “They don’t say my name.”

  There was a silence, and Henry couldn’t seem to swallow past the lump in his throat. “Were they paying for the dorm?” he asked finally, because he needed the end of the story.

  “Well, not after that.” Lance’s mouth twisted. “I had about a month to find new digs, find a job that would work around my hours. I’d been watching Johnnies porn for years, thought it was great that they were in my hometown. I’d even met some of the guys for non-penis-related injuries, and they seemed… fine. Nice. A little cocky, you know, because obviously they can fuck on camera and good for them, but not awful. And I’d just broken up with a guy who wanted me to be a dirty little secret. I was my class valedictorian, in med school for Christ’s sake, and my parents wanted to forget they’d ever had me. I… it was very fulfilling, if you know what I mean. To wave my gay penis around and say, ‘Hide this, motherfuckers! Hide this!
’”

  Henry smirked, because sweet revenge was something he got. “Well done,” he said gruffly, meaning it. “You’re braver than I ever was.”

  Lance’s hand on his ankle wasn’t sexual, exactly, but it was tender. Kind, gentle—things Henry had never asked for, had never been given. That kindness was like a solvent, dissolving the last of the shell that held Henry’s words back in his throat.

  “How’d your coming out go?” Lance said softly.

  “It’s still going.” And wasn’t that the truth. “I’m not even sure how you know.”

  “Because I looked at your eyes when you looked away.”

  “Do the other guys?”

  Lance considered. “They’re pretty comfortable with you—maybe. But that’s what this is about.”

  So much for putting things off. “I… my best friend married my sister, right out of high school.”

  “So?” Lance cocked an eyebrow.

  “So, his bachelor party was me and him with a fifth of jack, an open field where nobody could see us, and his dick in my ass, no lube, because that was the one thing we hadn’t done yet and he wanted to do it before he got married and we’d have less time to hook up.”

  Lance sucked in a breath of what sounded like horror. “Fucking. Ouch.”

  Henry let out a little laugh. “Yeah. We were going into the Army in two months anyway. I figured….” He shrugged. “Figured it was the last hurrah for Mal and me. Some people give up their virginity on prom, so what was the big deal?”

  “Was it? The last hurrah?”

  Henry swallowed, and the bitterness didn’t go away. “No. I mean, next time I made him use lube, believe you me, because it took me a week to stop bleeding—but there was always a next time. After basic training, there was still a next time. Every time we got leave, there was a next time. And… and every time I’d get like, ‘Mal, dude, you’re married. This is wrong,’ he’d be like, ‘Just guys fooling around, right? I mean, it can’t be sex if there ain’t a girl involved.’” He left out parts, parts with Mal’s lightning-quick hands and bruises Henry had brushed off as being part of training or sparring, but that wasn’t important, was it?