Sidecar (15 page)

Casey grinned. “Dev’s coming over for dinner, and your mother called.”

Joe grunted. “What’d she say?”

Joe’s mother had called periodically, maybe once a month, since Casey had come to live there and probably before that. She seemed like a nice woman, and she’d always been kind and interested in Casey’s life. For two Christmases in a row, she’d sent him a gift certificate to Sears, and given the fact that he still hadn’t lost his taste for spiffy clothes, he’d been grateful.

“Your sister had another baby.”

“Sister or sister-in-law?”

“Your sister. Cheryl.”

Joe grunted again. “I already sent her a gift and a card—did she have another one in the last week?”

Casey shook his head. “No, but your mom seemed pretty insistent that you call her too. She said you were becoming like your Great-Uncle Oscar—just a name on a tag with a really good present from nowhere.”

Joe grunted again. “Cheryl’s a priss. She’s more comfortable with me being Great-Uncle Oscar. It makes her happier than having to deal with Josiah Daniels. Did my mom say anything else?”

Casey laughed. “She said you should take me out there for Christmas this year.”

Joe tilted his head back. “Really? Did she
really
say that?”

“Yeah. She says I’m the closest thing to a grandkid you’re ever going to give her.”

Joe put his face in his arms. “Oh Jesus. Is she talking about grandkids
again
? She’s got
ten
. And you’re not my
son
, you’re my
friend
. You’re like a cousin something—”

“Yeah?” Casey looked at him hopefully. Cousin was
so
much more doable than surrogate son. Excellent. Him and Joe—it could happen! But first, there was Dev for dinner.

Joe was oblivious to the undercurrents of Casey’s happiness, still lost in the vagaries of family drama. “God, what’s it going to take to get her off my back?”

“You could show up with Derrick and sleep in the same bedroom,” Casey said gaily, and Joe groaned some more.

“He’s
so
persistent!”

“Yeah! He likes you! Why don’t you put out for him?”

Joe covered his face with his hands. “Because the waitress from The Oar Cart keeps hitting on me too. I need to choose one of them.”

“Lynnie? Really? She’s hot, if I went for that sort of thing.”

“You mean with breasts?”

“Yeah.
That
sort of thing.”

“Well, I do and she is.” Joe sighed. “And, let’s face it, she’d be easier to talk about to Mom.”

Casey pulled out the hot pads and paused as he was opening the stove. “You mean your mom doesn’t know?”

Joe raised his eyebrows and straightened up over the table. “I don’t know what you’ve been watching on daytime television, but not all mothers are thrilled to hear the sexual revolution was quite so successful.”

Casey raised his eyebrows, and Joe blushed and shrugged. “If I end up in a long-term relationship with a man, Mom will know. As it is, I’m not in a long-term relationship with
anyone
, and she’s pretty sure I’m not celibate. We don’t all talk to our authority figures about sex, Casey. Can you live with that?”

Casey just shrugged, feeling an unexpected lump of disappointment. “Are you ashamed that you sleep with men sometimes?”

Joe sighed. “No.” He sighed again. “Some of the best moments of my life have been with another man.” For a moment, Casey’s world was golden. “And some of the best moments have been with a woman too.” And the world was back to regular old color TV. “I don’t want my parents to… to
label
me, or what I do, or what sort of person I’m going to bring home before I know myself, okay?”

Casey digested this in silence and then bent and pulled the casserole out, using the quilted hot pads carefully as he took it to the table. He’d chopped up lettuce for a salad and put it in their one wooden salad bowl. Joe, sensing the occasion, whether Casey would admit to one or no, got out the good glasses—cut crystal—and put them at all three settings.

“So,” Joe said, his voice a little less defensive, “are you going to tell me what the occasion is, really?”

Casey smiled at him, realizing that he wasn’t disappointed after all. Joe was only human. The things that made him such an outstanding refuge to people just exactly like Casey were the same things that wouldn’t want to cause a fuss about a significant other until there was a fuss to be had. “I took my placement exams at Sierra today. I see my counselor in a week, and I can register for classes.”

Joe’s beautiful, even grin split his face, white in the dark hair of his mustache and soul patch. “That’s
awesome
, Casey! I’m so proud of you!”

He stood up and gave Casey a massive hug that Casey returned, closing his eyes and sinking into Joe’s solidness with something close to desperation.
God, Joe. I love you so much, and I don’t think it’s the way you want me to, and I don’t think I can change it.
Joe’s arms were strong around his shoulders right then, though, and Casey wouldn’t fuck up this moment, this pride, for anything on the planet, even the raging going on in his head.

There was a knock at the door right then, and Joe backed up and ruffled his hair, then went and opened the door for Dev.

Derrick was right behind him.

Joe’s smile at Derrick was… troubled, to say the least, Casey thought. But Joe had some old-world manners, in spite of the motorcycle and the facial hair and the constantly ripped jeans. He fixed his smile and reached out a hand, shaking Derrick’s hand heartily. Derrick’s rectangular, pretty face looked bemused, a reddish-brown eyebrow arched skeptically, as though this hadn’t been the greeting he’d expected, and Casey wondered meanly if he’d thought Joe would simper and kiss his cheek.

“Come on in, man! Casey cooked up a storm—he’s sort of celebrating his entrance into junior college, you know?”

“’Cause that’s so hard?” Dev asked, rolling his eyes and moving past them to kiss Casey on the cheek.

Casey looked at him levelly. “My SATs were higher than yours, rich boy,” he said, his voice and face pleasant, and he was gratified when Dev flushed.

Dev smiled, somewhat ingratiatingly, and Casey thought that he might mean well, and moved in for a kiss. Dev opened his mouth with satisfying eagerness, but that didn’t stop the unease in Casey’s gut. This relationship was nice, but it wasn’t going to be happy ever after—he’d be lucky if it was sex for the night. (They’d gotten sort of good at it, lately, and Dev had quit bitching about the condom about a month after Debbie’s funeral. Sometimes Casey thought that might be because he was cheating, but since Casey was dating him while still being in love with Joe, he figured it was only fair.) Their relationship really was that tenuous, and sometimes he wasn’t sure who couldn’t stand who the most.

But this night—this night it didn’t matter. Casey felt proud of himself, of where his life was going, and Joe was proud of him too. They sat, they ate, Joe pulled ice cream out of the freezer, and they had dessert. They watched
Terminator
, although Casey was
dying
for
Batman
to come out on video.

“We saw it in the theaters!” Joe protested good-naturedly, and Dev looked at Casey funny.

“I asked you to see that movie. You said no!”

Casey flushed and grabbed a handful of popcorn over Jay’s fuzzy orange head. The cats tended to sprawl out on Joe and Casey’s laps when they watched television, and the dogs slept on special pillows in the kitchen by the garage door. Casey had tuckered them out tonight, which was good, because Rufus tended to beg for popcorn. Joe had an air popper, and when you added garlic salt to the butter, it was
so
good. “Yeah,” Casey answered to Dev’s whine about
Batman
, “but that’s because Joe and I had been talking about seeing it for a month. We had a day set out special and everything. I didn’t want to blow that.”

“I haven’t seen it yet,” Dev said, his voice pitching, and Casey pulled back on his temper.

“It’s still at the theater in Auburn—we can go this week.”

“Yeah, but….” Dev scowled at him. “Jesus, Casey. You made me watch
Ghostbusters II
—that movie
sucked
!”

Casey remembered what else had sucked that night, and he grinned at Dev and arched his eyebrows wickedly. Dev blushed and grinned and the discussion was effectively tabled, but Casey had to sigh inwardly. It was true—and maybe one of those things that made their relationship so tenuous—Casey did save the best parts of himself for Joe.

The movie ended, and Dev tugged gently on Casey’s hand. Time to go to bed. Casey stood up reluctantly. It had been an epic action-adventure movie, but at the same time it had left him vaguely unsettled. Nuclear Armageddon seemed very close sometimes. This was the sort of thing he talked to Joe about, the sort of thing Joe managed to make him not feel so stupid about. Joe would show him a
Bloom County
cartoon or talk about all the many ways the Bible had been misinterpreted, and Casey would manage to get to sleep without waking up in a cold sweat. He couldn’t do that with Dev there—he just couldn’t. With Dev he had to put on a face that the whole world was all okay. Joe knew that Casey had seen the world when it hadn’t been okay at all. Joe knew that, sometimes, he still saw it that way.

But Joe was standing up and stretching, and Derrick was looking at his exposed tummy with hooded eyes, like he wanted to get him some of that. The two of them had sat at opposite ends of the couch while Casey and Dev had sat between them on the floor, and not once had they even tried to hold hands, although Casey and Dev had been practically on top of each other. Casey knew the signs, though. He remembered when Joe had dated Sharon. He knew the deferential silence, the offers to go get popcorn. There was something brewing between them.

Casey let Dev pull him toward his bedroom, though, and Joe gave a sleepy, innocent grin as they disappeared down the hallway.

“Good night!”

You don’t want him, Joe. He’s sort of fast and slutty, and he just barged his way in here and—

“Casey, you coming?” Dev asked impatiently, and Casey sighed.

“Good night,” Casey said wistfully, turning toward Dev and what was likely to be some decent, if silent, sex.

He never did see what Joe’s expression was. For years, he thought it was probably indifferent, but eventually, eventually, he began to suspect it might have been as reluctant as his own.

H
E
SLEPT
badly—bad dreams that Dev was not very patient with, usually elbowing him in the side with a “Jesus, what’s wrong!”—and therefore woke up when Joe was in the shower. They’d managed to install an upstairs shower directly above the downstairs shower, but something about the homemade plumbing job caused the pipes to groan terribly with the water pressure it took to force the water up. The sound was so bad that Joe still frequently took his showers downstairs. The fact that he didn’t on this morning told Casey way too clearly how the night had gone.

Casey groaned and rolled over, but Dev wasn’t there. Casey blinked hard and took a breath and registered that his shower had been used recently. Dev brought his own aftershave from home when he stayed over, and it was
really
strong.

Oh God. Who could shower this early in the morning? Casey needed his coffee first, and with any luck
someone
had made coffee when they’d gotten up.

He rolled out of bed, pulled on some scrubs (because they still spelled comfort to him, even after nearly two years), and made his way out his bedroom door with his eyes half-closed. He
literally
almost collided with Joe as Joe came down the stairs, wearing his own scrubs as pajama bottoms and still pulling a brush through the wet, tangled hair that fell halfway down his back.

“Hey, Derrick!” he called as the two of them righted themselves and stumbled, half-laughing, around the corner of the living room. “Could you make us some coffee while you’re down… there….”

“Are you shitting me?” Casey asked, looking blankly to the little dinette set where they’d eaten dinner the night before.

“Oh… for fuck’s sake.” Joe’s voice was equally dispassionate, and Dev looked up from his place, bent over the table, Derrick behind him, in a reversal of the pose Casey knew intimately from the night before.

“Dev, you said you wouldn’t bottom!”

“For fuck’s sake, Derrick, are you even wearing a
fucking condom
?”

Derrick stopped pumping his cock into Dev’s ass and caught his breath. “Joe… I’m sorry, he was totally asking for—”

Joe hit him.

Casey had never seen Joe move that fast, but sure enough, he lunged and threw a beauty of a haymaker in one fluid motion that had more to do with Joe being almost constantly active than with him being a born fighter.

Derrick went over backward, smacking his back on the wall of the small dinette space, and Dev fell off the table, naked and pathetic, his erection shriveling on his thighs as he fell down hard on his elbow.

Derrick sat down hard, rubbing his jaw gingerly and looking at Joe with an almost sheepish expression. “No second date?” he said hopefully.

“Remember the weed you offered me?” Joe said, his voice cold and grim.

“You want some
now
?” Derrick’s shock seemed misplaced somehow.

“Leave it on the dresser when you get your shit,” Joe said. He looked at the microwave clock. “You’ve got five minutes.”

Derrick scrambled up without looking back, pulling his jeans up and buttoning them as he went.

“Devin?” Joe said, and Dev made an effort to push himself up. “You okay?”

“Yessir.”

“Did he force you?”

Dev didn’t meet Casey’s eyes. “No, sir,” he said quietly.

“Then I need you to leave. For pretty much fucking ever. Casey, you got a problem with that?”

“No, sir,” Casey said grimly, shaking his head at Dev. Jesus. He’d known. He’d seen it fucking coming. But it was one thing to fuck around on Casey with his high school friends, the ones in all the academic clubs, because they were handy or because Dev had the morals of a hamster, but to do this in Joe’s house? Under Joe’s roof? Joe had been pretty fucking decent to Dev—screwing his date in the breakfast nook was pretty low.