Rainbow Blues (25 page)

In agony, he stared at the countertops and cupboards he and Jimmy had picked out together in those frantic, bittersweet moments before he left for Hollywood. His mouth opened in a silent scream and sobs wracked his chest.

He was never going to cook for Jimmy in this house. They were never going to have the barbecues they’d talked about. Christening each room by getting naked and fucking each other’s brains out was never going to happen. The only memory of that would be in the master bedroom.

Even if he could afford the house on his own, how could he live here? How could he live in the house that was supposed to be for them both and not be bombarded at every turn by the palpable lack of Jimmy? Trying to paint on walls primed for Jimmy’s artistic input would be impossible.

It had been the best eight months of his life, and they were over, all too soon.

There would never again be a reason for an “out of the blue, I was thinking of you” present. That one thought exploded through the last shreds of Luke’s control, and he tipped over onto the floor and cried until his nose was swollen and his eyes were painful and dry, every last tear shed.

J
IMMY
CLAWED
his way back to consciousness. Light stabbed at his eyes, and his mouth was as rank and gritty as if he’d been eating sand. The pounding in his head made an unpleasant counterpoint to the roiling in his gut. It had been a long fucking time since he’d been this abysmally hung over. But then, he’d gone two months without a speck of sugar, fat, or alcohol.

Last night. Jimmy groaned. Last night he’d completely
overloaded all three by accident. Overloaded. It hadn’t seemed too much at the time, but he’d based his consumption on his pre-cardboard eating days and heavier weight. His stomach turned over again, keeping time with the mariachi band in his head.

Fuck. He was too old for this shit. He just hoped he hadn’t done anything that would piss off the school board too badly. Because he wanted to go home to Luke, back to his life of being a teacher and part-time stage actor. It was a good fucking life, and he loved it.

First, though, he had some serious love for the ibuprofen in his bathroom. He lifted himself up, slowly, and shuffled to the bathroom as quickly as his head and stomach would allow.

Once there, the sight of the toilet triggered an almost painful need to piss. He took care of business, downed a couple of glasses of water with the pills, and after his stomach decided to accept his offering, took a cool shower to help clear his head.

By the time he got out—and he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t dozed off somewhere in the middle of soaping himself up—his headache had abated to a more manageable throb, and his stomach was now equally angry and hungry. Jimmy judged that a step in the right direction and toweled off carefully, not wanting to disrupt the delicate equilibrium he’d achieved.

Naked, he wandered back into his bedroom. He knew for a fact there wasn’t one fucking thing in the apartment he wanted to eat, but he wasn’t sure he had the energy to go out and scavenge for something.

As he pulled on a pair of boxer briefs, his phone buzzed, vibrating atop the nightstand. Grabbing it, he saw he’d missed a number of calls—how the hell had he slept through the incessant buzzing, he didn’t know. The most important one was the one from his lawyer.

After playing the message, his shoulders slumped in relief. It might take a few days, but Matthew would make sure he didn’t have to play out some farce of a tabloid romance. What a fucking relief. Even after the success of
Brokeback Mountain
, Jimmy had been surprised that
Walking Wounded
ended up as a movie, never mind anticipating that they’d want to make up a gay romance as a publicity stunt. It had just never even occurred to him. Matthew’s message had said as long as he was willing to do typical publicity events, there was no reason to stay in Hollywood once filming wrapped.

Which it had done yesterday. Jimmy flopped back down on the bed. A short nap, then he was booking a flight home.

W
HEN
J
IMMY
woke up again, it was just after noon, and he didn’t feel so much like death on a cracker. He scrabbled for his phone in the bedding where he’d dropped it. There were a slew of new texts, a voice mail from Aaron, and a bunch of voice mails from numbers he didn’t recognize.

He skimmed through the texts from his family. He must be still drunk, because they didn’t make any sense. None seemed urgent, though. No one was dead or hospitalized. They merely seemed upset with him. He scrolled down to the new message from Damian.

You need to call me ASAP! I must know what Aaron Young is like in bed. DETAILS!

That made even less sense, but at least there was a link attached to the text.

A New Romance for Aaron Young?

Inside sources on the
Walking Wounded
set say Aaron Young and his costar, Hollywood newcomer James Alexander, have gotten pretty cozy with each other….

Jimmy scrolled through a set of damning photos, his horror growing with each one. The one of them coming out of the men’s room yesterday was like a physical blow to Jimmy’s alcohol-irritated stomach. Nausea roiled in his gut, and he closed his eyes, taking a few deep breaths. When the urge to hurl passed, he called Aaron.

“Did you get my message? James, I am so sorry.”

“Fuck, no, I didn’t listen to the message, but did you see this article? What the fuck is this?”

“Apparently the powers that be thought they could ram through this publicity stunt. I’ve got my agent on it, but not much we can do about what’s out there.”

Jimmy’s headache was back, hot and angry. “I can’t believe this.”

“My guess is that reporters and bloggers and shit will be trying to get in touch with you for an interview. If you don’t recognize the number, don’t answer.”

Oh dear God. All those voice mails. At least there wasn’t a picture of him buying the gift for Luke. Aaron had come through about ducking everyone, because he couldn’t imagine having some stupid blogger assume he was giving that gift to Aaron, not Luke.

“Assholes.”

“Yep. No job is perfect.”

“I was planning to check the flights back home, leave as soon as possible. I’ll just have to lay low until I can get out of here.”

“I’m going to miss you, Jimmy. I know we’ll see each other for publicity events, but I had a great time working with you. And if you change your mind about acting, you let me know. Good luck with the damage control.”

“Damage control?”

“With Luke. Tell him I’m sorry this happened. If I hadn’t come out, maybe they wouldn’t have bothered trying this.”

“Uh, yeah. Talk to you later.”

Jimmy ran for the bathroom and puked.

After his stomach stopped spasming, he drank some more water and stumbled back to the bedroom. Surely he didn’t have to do any damage control with Luke, did he? Luke had to know it wasn’t true. Although apparently his entire family thought it was true, for God’s sake. His messages made a lot more sense in that context. They all thought he was cheating on Luke in front of the media. For fuck’s sake, he wouldn’t do that to anyone, let alone the man he loved more than anything.

But there wasn’t a text or a message from Luke. Jimmy couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Or maybe it was a Luke hadn’t seen the article thing.

Fuck. He was getting the first flight out of here.

Amazingly, for a small fortune, he could get on a plane in three hours. With two stops, he wouldn’t get home until six in the morning, but he booked it and called for car. With an hour to pack, he should still be able to make it to LAX in plenty of time. He left another message for Matthew, telling him he was leaving town immediately. If anyone needed anything from him, they could go through Matthew. Bastards.

Before he even started, though, he had one more thing to do.

Unfortunately, his call went straight to Luke’s voice mail.

“Hey there. Long story to tell you, but filming’s done, and I’m going to be home in the morning. Can’t wait to see you. Love you.”

His finger shook, ever so slightly, as he disconnected the call. Luke was probably just busy. Or forgot to charge his phone. Or maybe was in an area without service. He wasn’t screening Jimmy’s calls. He couldn’t be.

E
XHAUSTED
, J
IMMY
tried to get comfortable in the airport chair, ball cap pulled low over his eyes. The cap had been a necessary purchase at LAX when he realized the blog article had been more far reaching than he’d assumed.

Fuck. Jimmy squirmed in his seat. They had people trapped at the gate. The least they could do was make the seats almost conform to the human body.

He rubbed at his eyes before pulling out his phone. It was way early in the morning to call anyone, but he’d tried calling Luke at LAX, right before boarding, and at his last stopover in Denver. He needed to hear Luke’s voice, make sure Luke didn’t believe some stupid story on the Internet.

The PA system announced boarding for his flight, and Jimmy made another call, however douchey it may be to call at this hour.

“’Lo?”

“Hey, Damian.”

“Jimmy? What the fuck time is it?”

Jimmy didn’t know. Geography wasn’t his strong suit; he wasn’t sure whether he was in the same time zone as Damian or not.

“Can you pick me up at the airport?”

“Now?” Damian was incredulous.

Jimmy rubbed at his eyes again. “No. My flight gets in at six fifteen. This morning.” Overnight flights sucked big donkey balls.

“Uh, sure. Might as well, since I’m already awake.”

“Thanks. I gotta go. We’re boarding now.”

Jimmy disconnected the call before Damian woke up enough to ask more questions. He wasn’t interested in answering any of them in a place as public as the airport.

Maybe on this leg of the flight he could get a bit of sleep.

“I
CAN
’
T
believe they did that to you.” Damian was still in shock after Jimmy had told him the whole story, which had taken almost the entire drive from the airport to Jimmy’s house.

“I know. I just hope Luke hasn’t freaked out.”

Damian shrugged. “He seemed like a pretty even-tempered, down-to-earth guy.”

Jimmy pulled out the house keys he hadn’t used in two months, although he’d touched them lovingly more than once when the loneliness had gotten to be too much.

“Where’s Luke’s car?”

“Maybe he’s working? Or didn’t you say he sometimes goes out to brunch with his son?”

Jimmy snorted, striving for normal. “You’re a gay man. When was the last time you went out for brunch at seven thirty in the morning?”

“Okay, true. But sometimes construction guys work on Sunday, right?”

Luke had worked a few weekend jobs since Jimmy had been away, but that didn’t explain why he wasn’t responding to any of Jimmy’s voice mails or texts.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Jimmy got out of the car and helped Damian unload his suitcases from the trunk. He patted his pocket to make sure Luke’s present was still there, same as he’d checked about a million times since he’d left LA.

“I’ll come in with you, okay?”

There was a funny note in Damian’s voice, and Jimmy glanced over. His friend was agitated, although he was trying to hide it. Shit on a shingle. Damian
was
afraid Luke had flipped out, and that Jimmy was walking into a domestic brawl.

“Fuck, Damian. Even after everything I told you, you think I cheated on him, don’t you?”

“No! Seriously, Jimmy, I don’t. But I don’t know what Luke thinks. It looked bad.”

If those shithead bloggers fucked up his relationship, Jimmy was going back to Hollywood to beat them about the head with a baseball bat. Or maybe shove their keyboards up their asses.

“Come on. The sooner I find Luke, the sooner I can straighten this out. Luke loves me and knows I love him.” Damian couldn’t know how important that was, how special, because he’d never been in love before.

Jimmy opened the door, and the faint scent of Luke almost made him stagger. How had he lived for two months without that?

“Luke? Are you here?”

Pointless to call, because he could sense no one was in the house. Damian dragged his suitcase inside.

Jimmy walked into the kitchen and gasped. “It’s so beautiful, Damian. He sent me pictures, but I had no idea.” He brushed a hand along the cool granite countertops. It almost looked like a magazine spread, except their kitchen was much smaller than those featured in magazines.

“You just going to wait here until he comes home?”

Damian’s words brought him back to his current dilemma. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try calling Zach or Bennett a little later.”

Jimmy hadn’t ever called either of them, but Luke had given him those numbers a while ago.

“Want me to hang around? I’m up now. You can tell me more stories about Hollywood.”