Finding Zach (31 page)

“Yeah, like I was really worried about that,” Zach said dryly. “Taff, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.” David twisted around to look at him. “What?”

“How come you never pushed the face-to-face thing? I mean, it was good. Really, really good. I mean, you mentioned it maybe twice, but always kind of in passing, like ‘we gotta try that someday’ sort of thing. But you didn’t push it. Doesn’t it feel good to you that way? Cuz I gotta tell you—it felt real good to me.”

“It felt great.” David rested his head back against Zach. “But it’s more… I don’t know. Intimate. You see everything that’s going on in your partner’s face then. And I thought—I thought maybe you weren’t ready for that. That you weren’t ready for that kind of intimacy. You know. Crap like that.”

“What changed your mind this time?”

David reached up and pulled Zach’s face down to kiss. Against his lips, he said, “‘Forever and always.’ Forever and always, Zach.”

Zach’s heart gave a great thump and his arms tightened around David. “I think I’ve got it figured out,” he said softly. “About the love thing? Cuz I think I do love you, Taff. There isn’t gonna be anyone else, ever. Just you.”

“I hope so,” David said softly, and kissed him, then got to his feet. “Come on, let’s get these clothes washed and some food in us.”

They picked up their wet clothes and went up the inside staircase to Zach’s apartment, stopping by the little laundry unit to toss them in the washer, “Since they’re all full of detergent now, anyway,” said Zach. Then Zach found them both sweats and T-shirts. “If we stay naked we’re never going to get any food in us,” he told David, who just grinned in his sweet, sleepy way.

“
C
AN
I ask you a question?” Zach said over the pot roast.

David took a swig of beer before answering, “
Another
one? You just asked me one a little while ago. Sheesh. Give a guy an inch and he takes a foot.”

Zach flicked a carrot at him; David bobbed and caught it in his mouth. “Asshole.”

“Dweeb. Go ahead.”

“Who was the first guy you were ever with? The one in high school you never told anyone about?”

David sighed. “Well, I promised I wouldn’t ever tell, but shit, high school was seven years ago… Matt Brewer.”

“
Matt Brewer
? The quarterback from Wesley Community High School? Holy
crap
! He was
gay
??”

“Obviously.” David snickered. “His mother hired me to tutor him so he’d pass math, or he’d blow his scholarship to UCo. He occasionally made jokes about gay boys in public, but I don’t think we’d had three study sessions before he was on his knees with my dick in his mouth. I mean, I knew I liked it from when Maggie and I fooled around, but God, what a rush when it was a guy doing it. If I hadn’t known about it already, I’d have known I was gay then.”

“Matt Brewer. Matt Fucking Brewer. Damn.” Zach was shaking his head in wonderment. “I always wondered who it was you tossed Maggie over for. I mean, when I was a kid, I figured you guys would get married right out of high school and it fucking broke my heart. Cuz I
knew
you were gay, even while you were going out with her; I just figured you were going to stay in the damn closet forever.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to come out in high school,” David pointed out reasonably. “Talk about a disaster waiting to happen. Even if Foothills was a pretty liberal school, we did a lot with the kids from Wesley Community, and there was a whole big anti-gay bunch there.”

“Apparently not Matt Brewer,” Zach said.

“Nah. He was okay. And I didn’t toss Maggie over for him. I’d busted up with him long before I came out to her. I did tell her I cheated on her, though not with who.”

“Whom,” Zach corrected absently.

“Speaking of which, how’s the tutoring going?” David grinned. “Speaking of tutoring.”

“Good. Maggie thinks I can probably take the GED in a week or two and pass it. Dad talked to the school, and the next time the school district’s running the test is the second week of July, so I’ll probably take it then. The results take two weeks so I should know by August first. So that gives me a couple of weeks yet to study. With time off for the Fourth of July party at Tyler.”

“So you’re going?”

Zach took a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m gonna try. I figure if I get there early before too many people are there, I won’t be like making an entrance or anything where people are going to be noticing me. I’ll just… hang out, or something. You’re coming, right?”

“Yeah.” David regarded him thoughtfully. “How much of us do you want on display there, baby?”

Zach looked up at the endearment. “You mean,
us
us?”

“I don’t know any other us’s around.”

“Oh. Well. I don’t know.”

David shrugged. “It’s up to you. Best buds or madly in love—your call.”

“Can I let you know?”

“Of course.” David reached across and took his hand. “We do everything at your speed, love. I told you that in the beginning. You set the pace.”

“It’s a lot of responsibility.”

“You can handle it.” David grinned. “Pass the pot roast, I’m still hungry.”

Chapter 22

“I
CAN
handle this,” Zach said, staring at the pale, hollow-eyed reflection staring back at him. “I can handle this, no problem. It’s just a barbeque, right? Hot dogs, brats, chicken, steaks, corn on the cob, apple pie, all-American tradition, fireworks, music, people, crowds of people, hundreds of people,
thousands
of people… oh, shit. I can’t do this.” He leaned forward, resting his head on the bathroom mirror, trying to decide if he should puke first or panic first. Puking had a distinct lead, but the tingling in his fingers and the shortness of breath told him that panic was gaining.

“Zach?” his father’s voice called from the living room.

Zach hauled in a breath and tried to answer but nothing came out. A moment later Richard appeared in the bathroom door and said, “I thought I’d find you hiding in here.”

A squeak emerged from Zach’s throat. He gave Richard a desperate look, then lunged for the toilet, where he brought up his breakfast. That, oddly, staved off the panic attack, so when he raised his pale, sweaty face to his father’s concerned one, he was breathing normally and more or less calm. “I think I have the flu,” he said hopefully.

“I think you have acute butterflied stomach,” Richard corrected. “Done?”

“I guess.” Zach straightened and reached for a paper cup to rinse out his mouth. “Now I have to brush my teeth again,” he complained.

“Poor baby,” his father jeered gently. “Seriously, Zach. Flu or nerves?”

“Nerves,” Zach said. “I think.”

“Brush your teeth.”

Zach obeyed, making as big a production out of it as he could manage to waste time. His father stood in the doorway the whole time, his arms folded and a wry expression on his face. Finally, Zach said, “Okay, I guess I’m ready.”

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Richard pointed out. “You were the one who said you thought you were ready. If you really don’t think you are, you don’t have to do this.”

“Yeah, I do,” Zach said with a sigh. “I need to be able to handle people around me.”

“You’ve been going out for several months now to clubs and stuff,” Richard said. “There are people there.”

“Yeah, but not people who
know
me,” Zach said. “Not people who work with my dad and knew me when I was a little kid, and stuff like that.” He rubbed his stomach with his fist. “They’re not quite strangers and not quite friends. I can handle either of those. It’s the in-between kind that I have trouble with.”

“It’s not just you,” Richard assured him. “Right now your mother’s in the bathroom redoing her makeup for the fourteenth time. She’s already had on eight different outfits and is back to the one she put on originally.” He shook his head. “We’ve done this Fourth of July barbeque for the last fifteen years with only a couple years’ exception, but to your mother, it’s still always the first time.” In a softer voice, he said, “You always used to love the Fourth. It’ll be fine; you’ll have a good time.”

“You know this is gonna play hell with your security team’s program for me,” Zach said. “There’ll be people here with cameras. My picture’s gonna get out, and security’s gonna get tougher, you know.”

“You’re the one who’s going to be most affected,” Richard said. “Does it bother you that you’re going to have to be more careful when you leave the compound? Are you worried about people wanting to talk to you about what happened? I’m pretty sure no one will have the discourtesy to bring it up today, but after today, you’ll be fair game.”

“I have to do this,” Zach said doggedly. “I have to know if I can deal with this, if I have any thought of going to college. I have to be able to deal with people. It’s like the last stage of the process, Dad. Right now, the idea of all those people… Jesus, I’m ready to puke again! But I
have
to do this. I have to.” He started to shake.

Richard threw his arm around his son’s shoulders. “Zach,” he said urgently, “it’s going to be
fine
. They won’t turn into monsters, I promise.”

Zach shot him a look. “Am I that obvious?”

“Well, it
was
what you were worried about, wasn’t it?”

“Not in so many words,” Zach said, “but I guess so. It’s that same feeling, anyway. You’d think I’d be beyond that now. You’d think the old brain would have figured out that there aren’t real monsters.”

“There are,” Richard said soberly. “You lived among them for five years. But there aren’t any here, I promise. And even if there were, you can deal with them. You’re strong—so strong I can’t believe it. I don’t mean to put pressure on you if you think you really can’t deal with it. I just believe in you and want you to believe in yourself too.”

Zach turned and rested his forehead on his father’s shoulder. Even after two years, he still hadn’t adjusted to the fact that he was a good two inches taller. David and Dad were the same height, and he was taller than both of them. It blew his mind. “I know,” he said, his voice muffled. “I
know
I can handle it; I just don’t
feel
like I can.”

“Two years of therapy rears its ugly head,” Richard said cheerfully. “You can distinguish between what you know and what you feel. That’s more than most people can do.”

“Most people don’t have two hours of therapy daily,” Zach said dryly.

“Come on, then, if you’re coming. We have to go winkle your mother out of her shell, and I thought you wanted to get there early so you don’t make an entrance.”

“Yeah.” Zach gave Richard a brief squeeze before letting him go and taking one last look at the mirror. “Do I look okay?”

“Ghastly,” Richard teased, then shoved his shoulder gently. “Come on.”

“
Z
ACH
! Hey, Zach!”

Zach turned at the sound of his name called over the rattle and rumble of the crowd around the beer tent. There had to be a thousand people here at least, and he pretty much only recognized a few of them. The two guys pushing through the crowd weren’t in that select group, but they looked to be about his age, and they
were
faintly familiar, though he couldn’t say who they were. They both stopped and grinned at him, and suddenly he
did
know who they were. “Jesse? Jeff?”

The shorter of the two turned to the one in glasses and poked him. “I
told
you he’d recognize us!” and he turned back to Zach and shoved out his hand. “How ya doin’, Zach?”

“Good, Jess,” Zach said, and shook his hand, then Jeff’s. “What are you guys doing with yourselves these days?”

“Jeff’s in grad school; I’m working at an accounting firm in Colorado Springs. My dad still works here, though, and when Jeff found out I was coming today he tagged along. Honest to Jebus, Zach, you done grewed!! How tall are you now?”

“Six-two,” Zach said.

“You pump iron?” Jeff asked interestedly. He didn’t, that was for sure; he was as lanky as he’d always been, just a bit taller. “I tried that once. Tore a ligament.”

Zach laughed. “I had a physical therapist teach me how to do it right.”

“I knew there was a reason,” Jeff said cheerfully. His grin faded. “Look, Zach, you got a minute?”

“Sure,” Zach said, the hair on the back of his neck prickling. “What’s up?”

Jeff led him and Jesse around the side of the beer tent out of the direct line of the entrance. “A few weeks ago, maybe three or so? Some guy was asking questions about you. Said he was writing a story on you. I didn’t tell him anything he couldn’t have found out anyplace else, but he was mostly asking about when you were in school, what you were like and stuff, not anything about now—not that I know anything about now, anyway. Anyway, I didn’t tell him much, and he didn’t stick around and push. But I wanted to tell you about it but couldn’t get home until this weekend and didn’t have your email address or anything.”

Zach’s throat was thick, but he took a breath and after a moment was able to say, “That’s okay—it happens. I don’t know how he found out you went to school with me, but things like that happen. I haven’t talked to the media and they don’t like that. They want you out there, hitting the talk shows and being on reality TV and crap like that, not minding your own business. What did he ask about?”