Foster Siblings 3: Brokedown Hearts (29 page)

David unfolded from the floor and pulled the vacant chair closer to Ben. “Then what?” he asked as he took a seat.

“I don’t know.” Ben shrugged, reaching for answers to give that he couldn’t quite get ahold of himself yet. “It’s a lot more responsibility. And I have this whole Mika mess to think about now. Who knows if he might be with me by then,” Ben added, speaking another first that had been living inside him for a while now. “If he is, that’ll be something that will distract me from giving night and day to the job the way I do now.”

David’s eyes widened, and he murmured, “So you have been thinking about taking in your brother. I wondered if you were.”

“Of course I have.” Ben exploded out of his seat and started to move in a prowl, his blood pumping fast as he finally released worries and fears he’d kept stuffed inside. “Mika needs someone. If his parents aren’t going to support him while he’s figuring out how to trust another guy enough to tell him he’s gay and is attracted to him, and then help him deal with the heartbreak and other consequences if things don’t go well, then it has to be me to step in and do it.” As Ben turned back to David, he scratched his fingers through his hair and folded his arms over the top of his head, out of gas. “If I don’t step up and do it, who will?”

“You don’t need to justify the why to me.” David shifted in the chair, watching Ben as he moved. “Or to anyone. You want to step up and be an ear and a shoulder for Mika because you love him, and because you know what it’s like to be in his shoes.”

“Yeah, of course.” Ben looked at the guy sideways and raised a brow his way. “That goes without saying.”

“No, not ‘of course,’” David shot back, passion infusing his voice. “No ‘it goes without saying.’ At least not for the other people in Mika’s life. There’s nothing ‘of course’ about loving and supporting a kid coming to terms with being gay.” Some of the color left David’s face then, and he drew his legs up against his nakedness, as if shielding parts of himself from view. “I know from experience that ‘of course’ sibling love isn’t automatically the first response when one brother turns to another for help.”

Shit, honey
. His chest constricting on behalf of that kid from years ago, Ben squatted in front of David and looked up into heartbreakingly damp ocean eyes. “None of your brothers helped you come out when you were a kid.”

Rocking a bit, David shook his head. “When I started having feelings for boys, I sort of told Travis. But I could see in his eyes he wasn’t ready to hear it, so I backed down. I was fifteen.” David wiped his eyes, pushed his chin up, and offered a wobbly smile. “I didn’t try it with anyone else. Travis was the one who seemed the most open, so if he wasn’t ready, I knew none of the others would be.”

Keeping eye contact, Ben rubbed David’s legs, trying to warm the chilled skin. “So you went all those years keeping everything buried around everyone.”

Scraping his chin against his knee, David nodded. “Except for Chris. He was the only one I ever let see the real me.”

“Right.” More and more, as misguided and twisted as David’s choices had been, Ben could understand how David had become so obsessed with Christian Sanchez. “And then he broke up with you, you let it get in your head, and the whole thing with him went south, and you didn’t have to tell anyone anything any longer.”

“Yeah.” David laughed, the sound gritty, but new glints of light once again started sparking in his eyes. “I was certainly out to everyone then, whether I was ready to be or not. You know the gory details.”

“Like I said before,” Ben reminded him, a growl filling his throat as he pushed up from his knees and moved back to his seat, “I know facts about your life via paperwork. Any judgment I made about you, any attraction I have for you, any move I made on you, I took after watching you and then meeting and talking to you, and finally trusting my gut.”

For a long moment David stared at the empty bed. Silence thickened the already humid room. He tapped his chin on his knee again and again and again but then abruptly turned to Ben and blurted, “So it was your gut that told you to push me that first and second time we were together, even though I was refusing because I was afraid? It wasn’t some note in my psychiatric files that told you the right way to handle me?”

Ben closed his hands tightly around the arms of the chair and forced down another snarl. “Of course not. Anyway, I don’t have those kinds of files on you.”

“Really?” David arched his brow so greatly it went halfway up his forehead.

Sighing heavily, Ben admitted, “I’m not saying I couldn’t obtain them if I had the time and right resources, but I don’t have access to Skye’s computers and programs right now, so I haven’t.” Even as Ben understood David’s line of questioning, for Ben to have to explain something like this was akin to a burr stuck in his shoe. “I promise I don’t have any of your medical files.”

A dull red crept up David’s face. “Because you’re on a forced vacation.”

With a sharp nod, Ben said, “Yes.”

“If you weren’t on vacation, would you use all your resources to find my psychiatric files and read them?” David didn’t look away, but the chewing on his lip intensified.

Honesty, Evans
. Ben walked a minefield, knowing anything that read as even the smallest of white lies would explode in his face.
Don’t give him a reason to doubt you.

“On day one,” Ben stated carefully, “if I’d been working through Skye, I absolutely would have started the work to obtain them.” David winced, but Ben kept going. “And if I hadn’t met you face-to-face, I would have read them as soon as they came to me. But once I interacted with you on the side of the road, and once we started talking and doing the things we’ve done, I would have questioned my need or the rightness of it.” Ben studied David, and even though his profession allowed him to easily read a dozen emotions running through David right now, he knew a hundred more lived beneath the surface, hidden, waiting for someone to care enough to discover them.

Devouring David with his stare, Ben rubbed his hand across a tight banding in his chest. “There is a very focused desire in me that wants to know everything about you, David,” he confessed. “I haven’t felt such clarity about anyone or anything in a long time. But I want everything I learn to be because you trust me enough to tell me, not through pulling sealed files because of my job.”

David wrapped his arms tighter around his leg. As he held Ben’s stare, he rubbed goose-bump-laden flesh. “What do you want to know that isn’t in the files you already have?”

One piercing uncertainty stabbed Ben straight through the middle. “Did I do the right thing by pushing you that second time?” Anguish filled Ben’s unsure soul. “I wanted you, and forcing you to take my cock in your mouth felt right at the time, but did you have nightmares afterward that mixed together what I did and what that guard did to you?” Exhaling loudly, Ben tipped his head over the back of the chair, closed his eyes to shut out the dirty ceiling, and pushed through the scratch nagging his throat. “Late at night, when I try to sleep and am not focused on the issue with Mika, I think about what I did, and about you.”

A painful heartbeat of silence later, a hand caressed Ben’s shoulder, and Ben jerked up to find David standing at his side.

David squeezed Ben’s shoulder and then leaned against the table. “After the initial panic, I was all right. Which surprised me.” With a shrug, David chuckled and blushed. “I guess you do have an instinct with me, because I think it was better to shove that dominant bad memory out and replace it with a more consuming one that was good. You.”

A protective growl rumbled up from Ben’s core, and he pulled David onto his lap. “You can turn that motherfucker in now, you know? He can’t hurt you anymore. He doesn’t hold any cards.”

A shiver rocked through David. “That man held my release over my head for the final year I was at Pensacola. If I didn’t do what he wanted, he threatened to make up some transgression that would extend my prison time. When you get that close to release, you can start tasting it, and in a minimum-security prison, it’s so attainable that you’re doubly careful about not doing anything to blow it. Cyril knew that. One report of actionable behavior from him, and another six months or year could have been added to my sentence.” Though he sat in this safe, secure room, beads of sweat still broke out on David’s upper lip and brow. “I didn’t dare do anything that would push back my release. I stayed quiet, did what he wanted me to do, and I got out.”

“But you know he’s got to be doing that very thing to someone else right now, holding the same threat over their head, right?” Ben hated to push someone in such a vulnerable state, but a life of law enforcement compelled him to speak. “Someone else is certainly suffering the same way you did at his hands.”

“I’m not in that place anymore, but I admit I’m still scared of him.” As fast as David wiped sweat from his face, more beaded his flesh. “I have nightmares that somehow he could counter a claim against me, and who would the courts believe? Him, of course.” David got up and pulled the comforter around his naked body. “And then I could end up in prison again.” Eyes as big and luminous as the sea dominated David’s face. “And maybe it wouldn’t be minimum security this time.”

Weary all of a sudden, Ben rubbed the five o’clock shadow marring his jaw. “What you do is up to you, but I would bet that if you pressed charges against him, it would only be a matter of time before a swarm of other ex-inmates came out of the woodwork to say he did the same to them. At that point there’d be little he could do to you.” The more Ben looked at the huddled mass of fear David had withered to in just these few minutes, the more his blood boiled. “Either way, if I’m ever up near Pensacola, I’m gonna find that man and beat the shit out of him and put the fear of God in him for you.” Christ, Ben was tempted to make a special trip to assure the beat down occurred.

Even though David still clutched the blanket around him like a cloaking device, he smiled from the opening he’d left for his head. “I know it shouldn’t, but it makes me feel really good to hear you say that.”

His entire being warming, Ben got up and sat next to David on the bed. “Good. It’s important to feel like you have someone who has your back.” He wrapped his arm around the bundle of man and blanket and tugged him close. “If your family won’t do it, I will.”

Nuzzling in, David pressed a kiss to Ben’s shoulder. “You said you grew up in homes and foster care.” He took Ben’s hand in his and fiddled with the blunt fingertips. “Did anyone ever step up to the plate for you?”

“Not really.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched, Ben disconnected—the way he’d done a thousand times in his adult life—and reached back into his past. “I took beatings in some places and was ignored as long as the check came in others. I learned how to take care of and depend on myself. I lived on the streets in Orlando for a little while when I was eighteen, after the system turned me out. It didn’t take long for me to realize I wasn’t going to be able to handle the jerks who came sniffing for a piece of boy ass to buy for ten minutes of sucking or bumping uglies in the backseat of a car.” A cynical laugh escaped, and Ben gave David an eye roll. “Even if I’d been down for that, which I wasn’t, I never looked much like a kid, even when I was one, and I wasn’t sweet or cute, so I wasn’t necessarily tempting to the sickos who looked for boys on the streets.

“One night I lucked into crossing paths with a runaway shelter volunteer; it was pretty early on after I’d hit the streets. She got me into the shelter for a short time. Her sister was a cop and planted the seeds in my head that I could have a good life if I chose a career in law enforcement. I saw the wisdom in it, got my shit together fast, and entered the academy. I worked as a cop for a lot of years before switching to the private sector when Skye made me an offer too good to refuse.” With another shrug, Ben pushed back against the head of the bed and finished, “I’ve been doing PI work for them ever since.”

David wiped wetness from the corners of his eyes. “Your childhood was pretty horrific, but you say it all very matter-of-factly.” He studied Ben, and the light of open adoration filled his gaze. “I’m impressed and humbled and inspired all at the same time. I’ve never met someone so levelheaded and well-adjusted as you.”

Chained hungers lived just under the surface inside Ben, too volatile to ever ignore, and he corrected, “What I know how to do is keep myself in control. Working on the force taught me that.” A sliver of the nasty shit from his childhood crept up to the surface, and a rancid taste filled his mouth. “I had to learn to keep discipline in myself when I was in those bad foster homes too. It was best to be as invisible as possible in those places, and that was always my goal.”

David’s mouth twisted down, and he hit himself in the leg. “I always thought I had it so bad with my family.” He poked at the skin he’d just reddened with his fist. “I didn’t know how lucky I was.”

“Hey, listen.” Ben grabbed David’s hand before he could bruise himself any further. “They aren’t comparable. You shouldn’t be grateful to have had a shit family who won’t love their kid unless he’s straight just because I didn’t have a family at all. Neither one is good or right. Both of them fuck with your head with equal power, just in different ways.”

Mouth pinched, David shook his head. “No, it’s different. I could have chosen to handle my situation with strength and dignity like you did, but I didn’t. I stumbled and did terrible things. Not only to myself, but to others too.”

His heart cracking for this man, Ben put his hand under David’s chin and forced him out of hiding. “And now you’ve picked yourself back up, and you’re doing better. You did your time. And Christian seems to have forgiven you. Why can’t you forgive yourself?”

“Because I didn’t just hurt Chris!” David cried, his voice breaking as he rose passionately to his knees. “I married a woman, knowing I couldn’t love her the way she deserved. I didn’t mean to, but I fucked with her head so bad she’s still pissed about it. Jonah still obviously hasn’t forgiven that I knocked him out and locked Christian in a room with me. And while my family might not have ever accepted me, they didn’t deserve the humiliation they must have had to bear publicly when I did what I did to Chris. And then for them to know I tried to kill myself…” David’s chin wobbled terribly, and he crumpled back to the bed. “They’re Catholic, and to them that is a terrible sin.”