Foster Siblings 3: Brokedown Hearts (30 page)

Ben swore under his breath. “I’d think good parents should be more concerned that their child was in such distress that he tried to end his own life rather than deal with their damning judgment of his sexual orientation than be worried what a town or a church thinks of them. But hey”—making a high-pitched noise, Ben threw his hands in the air—“I never had parents, and I don’t have a kid, so what do I know?”

David studied Ben as if he’d grown another head. “Why don’t you judge me?” His voice wavered and dropped to a near whisper. “I don’t understand why you don’t look down at me for everything I’ve done. I don’t understand how you’re not concerned I’ll fall again and do the same things to you.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Ben answered, an easy grin and a purr filling his throat. “I’ve told you, I can handle you. Besides, in my gut”—he took David’s hand and kissed it gently—“I believe you’ve grown and changed.”

David flung himself at Ben and grabbed hold of his shoulders. “I worry that I haven’t. I worry that instead of hurting myself, I’ll hurt you.” With David’s face buried in Ben’s neck, his fears were muffled, but Ben could still hear them. “I worry about it every day.” He clutched Ben so tightly his shorn nails dug into Ben’s upper back. “I really don’t want to hurt you.” Wetness fell from David’s lashes to Ben’s skin. “I think it would kill me if I did.”

“Hey, hey.” Ben cuffed the back of David’s head and pulled him so only inches separated their faces. “If you don’t believe in yourself yet, lean on the faith I have in you. You’re doing good things now. You’re making a new life with a strong foundation of real friends, and you’re being honest with them about who and what you are.” Ben pushed blond strands from David’s forehead and tears from his cheeks. “Those things are going to hold you in good stead, no matter what life throws at you in the future.”

With a small shift of his head, David kissed the side of Ben’s hand. “I don’t deserve you.”

Dragging the man in, Ben pressed kisses to his forehead and cheeks and basked in the strength of the arms holding him so very securely. “And maybe after concealing why I was in Coleman in the first place, I didn’t deserve a second chance from you, but you gave me one anyway.” Up and down, back and forth, Ben rubbed his hands across David’s back, loving how the skin warmed under his touch and the goose bumps went away. “We’re here now, together, talking about important things, so maybe we’re exactly where we’re both supposed to be.”

David burrowed in somehow closer to Ben and said against his ear, “I don’t want to let you go.”

“So don’t.” Without thought, Ben pulled David down next to him in bed and settled the distressed man against his side. “I’ll stay with you all night.” Barely having to move, Ben reached out and doused the lamp. “It’s exactly where I want to be.” Before Ben could wiggle back into place, the kitten trotted up the bed and began kneading the headboard with her nails. Chuckling, Ben added, “And apparently Elsa too.”

“She likes you.” From his place plastered to Ben’s side, David tipped his head up and kissed Ben on the jaw. “I do too.” He then yawned loudly.

A sweet pain pierced Ben’s chest, and he had to blink away a burn from behind his eyes. “I like you too, honey.” He buried his lips in David’s soft blond tresses and kissed him. “More than you know.”

David snuggled up tighter against Ben, using Ben’s chest as a pillow, and quickly settled into the even breathing of sleep. Above them, Elsa circled twice and then finally curled into a ball above their heads.

Ben held David in his arms, his mind spinning in a thousand different directions with possible plans for the future. He wouldn’t sleep; he rarely did more than doze unless he was home in his own bed. But at least he could begin to make plans. Ones that included both Mikael and David.
I hope so anyway.

Right then David threw his leg across both of Ben’s and tucked his arm across Ben’s middle, holding him just as securely as Ben did him.

Fuck
. Ben ran his hand down David’s bare thigh to the back of his knee.
He feels nice.

WITHIN TWO MINUTES, Ben’s soft snore drowned out the kitten’s purrs.

* * * *

David stretched across the bed, but the warmth of another male body didn’t heat his skin the way it had a dozen times during the night.
What?
He blinked, but the blur from sleep in his eyes turned his vision fuzzy. He made out a big shape across the room, but before he could rub his eyes, the shape moved to him and stooped next to the bed. Ben became clearer, and David shook himself to get the fog out of his brain.

“No.” Ben guided David back down to the bed before he moved more than an inch. “Don’t get up. Sleep in. Enjoy your rare day off. I have to go to my room to shower, and then I have to make a quick trip to Tampa. I need to talk to the Skyes and get some stuff from my apartment.” Ben pecked a kiss to David’s cheek and bounced back to his feet. “I’ll be back before you know it. Probably after lunch. Maybe we can do something together then. Bye.” He waved at the kitten curled at the foot of the bed. “Bye, Elsa.”

With each fast step Ben took to the door, David’s chest pounded faster and harder, and a tiny invisible knife began nicking hole after hole in his chest, slowly tearing him open.

The moment the door clicked closed behind Ben, David threw back the covers and flew to his dresser for a shirt, underwear, and jeans. Ignoring socks—they would take way too long to put on—David shoved his feet into his running shoes without bothering to untie the laces. Not pausing to put a backpack of provisions together, David swiped his key from the table and slipped out of his room, his focus on Ben’s door the whole way.

Ben probably took quick showers. He seemed efficient in that way. And David needed all the extra minutes he could get to talk Brittany into lending him her car without giving away why.

By the time Ben hit the Interstate, David already needed to be positioned by the side of the road if he had any chance of following Ben without being detected.

Chapter Thirteen

Hours later David eased into a parking spot on the side of the road across from Ben’s condo building. Ben drove his car into the building’s garage, but David knew he didn’t have enough information to get inside without detection.

As David killed the engine in Brittany’s car, he banged his hand against the steering wheel, and for the hundredth time since leaving Coleman on the tail of Ben’s car, he silently berated himself.
Why am I doing this?
David pulled obsessively on the band wrapped around his wrist, snapping his flesh with it over and over again.
I know it’s wrong. This has to stop.

Just as David had overridden the sounds of logic screaming in his head on the drive over, and while sitting outside of a building in downtown Tampa for an hour and a half—he’d sneaked inside the office complex to confirm that Skye Investigations had one of the floors for their business—David continued to chastise himself, but he didn’t start the car and leave. He couldn’t. The desire inside him to keep an eye on Ben pushed at him harder than the piece of his conscience that tried to get him to listen to how wrong this was and cease.

Nearly as bad as following Ben partway across central Florida, David wasn’t sure he’d fooled Brittany with his reason for needing to borrow her car. She hadn’t acted weird or suspicious, but David couldn’t shake that his excuse of “I want to buy some stuff to make a special lunch for everyone at the shelter tomorrow” hadn’t passed her sniff test.

But she still gave you the car
. Wait. David narrowed his stare and looked in the rearview mirror, as if he could see Brittany all the way back in Coleman.
What?
A different knife, with new cuts, began punching holes through David’s middle.
If she didn’t believe you, then she must be trying to sabotage your recovery. She wants you to stay weak and to go back to prison.

Suddenly a jag of laughter burst through David, and he dropped his head to the steering wheel. “Oh God.” He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever thought.”

Just as fast as David had put his head down, he jerked back up straight. Not only was his thought about Brittany ridiculous, this whole episode was ridiculous. Not only had David followed Ben like a lunatic, for a second David had seriously considered that his dearest friend, the one person who’d completely supported him from the moment she’d introduced herself to him a year before he’d gone off the deep end, was capable of consciously doing harm to his psyche. Just how far down the road of insanity had David slipped today?

His heart now racing for an altogether new reason, even as the first one still circled like an animal moving in closer for the kill, David pulled out his phone and sent a text message to Dr. Fariday, begging for help. David needed to find his bearings and get back on sure footing fast, before he slipped too far and couldn’t get up again.

Long minutes passed in panicked silence, wherein David glanced back and forth between his phone and Ben’s apartment building, bouncing between waiting for a text or phone call or Ben to emerge in his car. Then, before David could see a vehicle, the exit gate swung open, and David automatically started Brittany’s car. A red SUV pulled out onto the road, and David slumped as a flood of cool relief washed through his system.

Thank God it wasn’t him
. Gasping, David took stock of the facts.
I’m not impatient or angry, creeping with doubts about what Ben must be doing in his place that’s taking so long. I’m just relieved it wasn’t him.

David needed to get out of Tampa. He needed to get out now, before Ben did emerge. David didn’t need a doctor to tell him his actions today had been destructive and wrong, that they’d been a huge slip in his recovery. David knew that if he kept this up, he would lose Ben just like he’d lost Christian. And this time it would be worse. This time, right from the start, David would have known Ben liked him for who he truly was, open for the world to see, and David would know he’d thrown a good man away in order to feed his insidious insecurities and trust issues.

The gate swung open again. This time, David didn’t wait to see if it was Ben’s black car. The street was clear, and with his whole body humming with too many endorphins, sweating and nervous in a way he’d never been before, David pulled onto the street and drove away.

He left Ben alone, unsupervised, and trusted that everything would be okay.

* * * *

Brittany sat across from David at the table in her motel room, digesting everything David had just told her about his day. And he hadn’t left anything out. With Dr. Fariday not yet replying to his text, David had become more and more agitated on his drive back to Coleman, and he couldn’t understand why. He’d done the right thing; that should calm him, not make him more nervous.

David had needed someone to talk to, and when Brittany had answered her door, it had hit him that she’d always come when he’d needed a friend, even when he was in prison hundreds of miles away.

Studying him like a specimen, Brittany finally said, “So you lied to me?”

David nodded and chewed on a fingernail. “I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, the absolute absurdity of the thought that you would ever consciously mess with my head is what woke me up and made me realize what I was doing. In a roundabout way, you’re the one who made me turn the car around and come home.”

“Thank God Ben didn’t see you.”

Pushing down in the hard chair, David put his head in his hand. “I know. But I have to tell him,” he added quickly, even as his pulse kicked up with nerves again. “If I lie, that’s almost as bad as following him in the first place. Especially since he knows how much his lies hurt me. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. Not anymore.”

With a nod, Brittany agreed. “You have such a good thing going with Ben, you don’t want to do anything that might blow it. Believe me”—with her auburn hair flowing softly and ethereally around her face, Brittany made a coarse fucking gesture with her hands—“I heard some of how good it was through these thin walls last night.”

David shifted from holding his head to covering his face. “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

“Actually”—she kicked him under the table—“of what I heard, it did sound pretty wonderful.” She crossed her arms and pinned him like a bug with her emerald stare. “If you didn’t keep sabotaging yourself, it might be a really good relationship for you.”

“I can’t help it!” David shot up from his chair, itching with the need to move. “That’s the problem.” He switched from pulling his hair to snapping his elastic hair tie against his wrist. “I got that urge to follow him this morning, like I just needed to know and confirm he wasn’t going somewhere else and tricking me, and nothing but satisfying that need mattered. I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Yeah, you could.” David swung around at that, and Brittany looked at him without cowing. “You heard me. You could. You told me that from the moment you got out of bed to get dressed, your conscience told you ‘no, don’t do it,’ but you did it anyway.”

“That’s the compulsion I have,” David cried, throwing himself back into his seat. “It’s the same thing that happened with Chris. Don’t you understand?”

“No.” Laser focused, Brittany wagged a finger at him. “This wasn’t like with Chris, where everything in your head was telling you that you were doing the right thing, and that Chris was supposed to be yours, and to keep going until you got him back. This isn’t a situation like back then where you were hiding so many things from so many different people, and when Chris broke up with you, the one good thing in your life spun out of your reach, and you didn’t know how to go on. Today, the whole way, you knew you shouldn’t follow Ben. You felt sick while you were doing it.” Pausing for a moment to pop a couple of pieces of peppermint gum in her mouth, Brittany then, smacking the gum loudly, crossed her legs on the table and pointed at David. “You, my friend, on some level, maybe one that’s so much a part of you that you don’t even see it, are deliberately trying to mess things up with Ben.”

David’s mouth gaped, and his heart lurched into his throat. “No, I’m not.”