Tough Love (11 page)

Still, it was harder than it should have been to put away his fear and face the man he’d been conditioned for so long to regard as an enemy. Not until Steve posted himself like a sentry at the wall near the fireplace was Chenco able to speak, and as he did his gaze kept flicking back to Vance.

“I’m Chenco,” he said.

Mitch nodded gruffly, tucking his thumbs in his jean pockets. “I’m Mitch. Your…older brother. I guess.”

He seemed about as stunned as Chenco felt. Their awkward silence made Chenco uneasy though, so he kept talking. “Chenco is short for Crescencio. My last name is Ortiz, but only because my mother made my stepfather adopt me legally. On my birth certificate it originally said Tedsoe, as my mother lived in hope for a long time.” Chenco moved the necklace closer. “Here. I only took it because it was pretty and I had a feeling it belonged to someone who had hurt Cooper, which made whoever it was my hero. It should be yours now.”

Mitch handled the trefoil as if it might dissolve at a touch. “It was my mom’s. Her great-grandmother gave it to her. It came from Ireland.” He drew a breath, and the next part sounded as if it came from the bottom of his gut. “When I was little and got scared because Dad hit her, she’d let me hold it.”

God, Chenco wished he could bring Cooper back to life so he could kill him. “Where is she now, your mom?”

“Houston. Remarried, though I don’t think she stepped up much.”

Mom was clearly a touchy subject, so Chenco let it go. Trouble was, he didn’t know what they were supposed to talk about now. “So. Anyway. It’s nice to meet you. Sorry for stabbing your friend.”

Mitch smiled. “Don’t worry about it.” He stared at the necklace for another minute, then tucked it in his pocket and squared his shoulders. “Right. I suppose we should do a proper introduction.” He pointed at the couch. “You met Randy, and this is my husband, Sam.”

Sam had been watching them, but at the mention of his name he came over and held out a hand to Chenco. “Hi. Nice to meet you.”

Chenco accepted his hand, trying to decide how angry Sam was. Not as bad as he’d feared, which was good. He put forth his best effort at making things better. “It’s nice to meet you. Sorry about that earlier. I learned to be wary of anything connected to Cooper, and I wasn’t sure meeting my older brother would be wise.” He turned to Mitch and shook his head. “It’s creepy how much you look like him.”

Mitch reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, withdrawing a beat-up pack of Winstons and a lighter. He lit up a cigarette as he answered. “I get that a lot.”

Chenco wondered if he should mention the journals, but instinct told him no, not just yet. Part of him worried speaking of them would bring the scary kid who’d penned the scree back to life. Instead he turned to Sam. “Is Randy going to be okay?”

Sam nodded, his frowning gaze lingering on his husband’s cigarette. “It’s literally only a flesh wound. It wasn’t deep enough to need stitches, and I cleaned it out and put some dressing on. He’ll bitch about it for a few days, but he’ll be fine.” He smiled a half-smile. “I’m an RN, so I know what I’m doing. He’ll be fine.”

Chenco glanced over at the couch. Randy looked a little pale, but otherwise he was much the same as he’d been the other two times they’d met—eagle-eyed and dangerous. He didn’t smile as he met Chenco’s gaze, though. If anything, he seemed guilty. “I’m very sorry. It just threw me when I put it all together. Plus
you
look like him too, you know.”

Chenco wrinkled his nose. “I do?”

Randy nodded. “It’s not so much your appearance as some of your gestures. They reminded me of Mitch and Cooper both. When I figured it out, I was so surprised I couldn’t stop my mouth.” He grimaced. “But knowing Cooper, I should have been more delicate about it.”

“It’s okay,” Chenco said, and he meant it.

It was fine, he decided, being here. It still felt odd to trust strangers so fast, but…well, the same instincts had initially told him this was a bad plan. Now they switched their allegiances to sticking around, especially as long as Steve Vance was in the picture. He wasn’t sure if this meant his instincts were seriously fucked or if things were okay.

It occurred to him that outside of a few texts, Booker had pretty much abandoned Caramela and Chenco both. The realization hurt—maybe Chenco was safe, but shouldn’t his friend have followed up a little better? He’d expected Booker to be here, supporting him, but he wasn’t. Probably he’d run home to Trist because he was upset.

What about me? You left me to strangers, to let them comfort me? And yet you ask me to surrender control of my career to you?

Chenco stilled himself, turning away into a quiet corner, pulling himself to center. It didn’t work, though, not as well as it should have.

He felt a hand on his arm, and the sweet, perfect memory of being on his knees came to him, making him okay.

“Chenco?”

Chenco opened his eyes, smiling up at his host. “I’m fine.”

Turning around, he took in the living room full of newfound family, then joined them.

They ended up out on the patio. Mitch stoked the chimenea, Randy found the extension cord for the twinkle lights, and Steve passed around bottles of Bohemia. Sam declined but accepted an offer of a margarita. Chenco only wanted water, though when he heard they had San Pellegrino, he gladly took one instead.

Steve hung back, watching and listening as the half-brothers got to know one another.

“My mom is illegal,” Chenco began, when asked to tell his story of how he ended up living with Cooper. “She came over with her first husband in the mid-eighties because he had some big plan about making it in America. They’d been middle class in Saltillo—she worked at a bank and had a woman clean her house once a month. In the valley, she was the one cleaning houses and being spit on for being an immigrant. It broke her heart. One night she ended up at a bar, a handsome American flirted with her, and I happened. She had it all fixed in her head, I think, how she’d fallen in love and the guy would rescue her like a prince. It was Cooper, and he wasn’t the saving type. She came to him when she was pregnant, and he called her a dirty whore and told her he’d kill her if she came near his wife.”

“Sounds like the old man, all right,” Randy said into the mouth of his beer bottle.

Chenco nodded, a curt acknowledgment. “It kind of worked out, though. She left her first husband in case I didn’t come out brown enough. He’s a first-class dick, so she was better off. She hoped for a few years, sending Cooper pictures of his baby boy, but it never came to anything. She was on her own, and it was bad, but then she met my stepdad.”

When Chenco paused to take a drink, Steve hated the look of loss that crossed Chenco’s face.

Clearing his throat, Chenco continued. “He owns a car dealership, and he has a big heart. I grew up in a nice house in Edinburg. I have a little sister and a baby brother, and we went to good schools, but Mom never let us learn Spanish. I always thought it was weird, having this crazy Mexican name to honor some grandfather I never met. But she named me before she decided I was going to be the one to make it, to be the big American star. I’d be a doctor, she said. I had everything I could want.” He smiled sadly at his bottle of Pellegrino, running his fingernail over the label. “Everything except a trunk full of dresses and heels.”

“So what happened?” Sam asked.

“What happened is she caught me in her makeup one too many times. I was in Catholic school, so they had me talk to the priests and nuns a lot. I think she could have handled the gay okay, but I was so fixated on the dresses, she flipped out. I can’t understand her Spanish so well, but she’d be on the phone to her best friend and cry about how she was afraid I was going to get a sex change. Didn’t matter that I told her I wasn’t. All she saw was she’d given me everything in the world, and I was throwing it in her face.”

Randy’s smile was sly. “That’s the problem with freedom. People tend to do whatever they want with it.”

Chenco shrugged. “Basically I was a bit of a mess when I was eighteen. She told me if I wanted my college money and a place to live, I had to date a girl and submit to my stepdad inspecting my life, making sure I wasn’t hiding any dresses or anything. I said no way, so she kicked me out, and I had to regroup fast. I thought, I’m going to find my father. I bet
he’ll
love me for who I am.”

“Shit,” Mitch murmured.

“Pretty much,” Chenco agreed. “Took me three months to convince him he was my dad, and this only after I stole a beer bottle and money enough for a DNA test. I don’t know what I thought this was going to prove—like he’d all of a sudden have a personality transplant, but it kind of worked out in the end. Part of it was he was plenty sick then already. He’d had his first stroke, and he couldn’t keep himself together. I needed somewhere to stay, and I was a little wild in the head over making it work. I kept telling him he owed me, and eventually I realized he couldn’t walk well enough to throw me out of the house and wasn’t strong enough to beat me, not badly. So I moved in.”

Chenco paused to wipe his mouth, as if the gesture would take the dark memories away. “He swore at me every day, and I barricaded my door at night because I never quite trusted him not to fuck me up. He told me about you, Mitch, but he promised you’d come back someday and kick the shit out of me, which was why I was so nervous after I saw you at the funeral. That and—” Chenco cut himself off and glanced at Steve.

Steve nodded. This wouldn’t be comfortable for Mitch, but it was important for Chenco to have this cleared up.

“That and what?” Mitch prompted.

Chenco bit his lip as he met his brother’s gaze. “I found your high school journals.”

Mitch averted his gaze to the patio tile, his face burning with shame.

“Why would this be bad?” Sam nudged his husband. “What did you put in—? Oh. You told me about this. How you bullied the guy I remind you of. You wrote in a journal too?”

Mitch looked like he’d love to crawl under his chair. “I wasn’t in a great place then.” Forcing himself to lift his gaze, he turned his focus to his brother. “I’m sorry you found those. I didn’t think they were still around.” He grimaced. “I
know
I burned the ones where I finally figured everything out. Probably should have left them so you didn’t think I was as big a dick as our dad.”

“It’s okay.” Chenco didn’t appear entirely at ease, but he seemed a lot less tense than he had when Steve had first tried to explain about Mitch. “I can’t imagine it was easy growing up with him.”

Instead of answering, Mitch gave a sharp snort of derision and drained the rest of his beer.

Sam stroked Mitch’s arm before turning to Chenco. “Why did you stay? Did he not treat you as badly?”

Chenco shrugged. “I had nowhere else to go. He treated me like a dog, but I gave as good as I got. Threw all his shit right at him. I didn’t do drag at first when I lived with him, but when he found out, he came at me with a knife. I got it away from him, said I’d call the cops, and he laughed. I locked up the knives after that. It was grim for a while, but then he had the second stroke, and he had to move to the home. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t argue or say no anymore. I paid for it because he said I would get the trailer, which turned out to be a big lie. I got him back, though. When he lay there drooling, I’d tell him all about my hookups because he couldn’t stop me. I made up shit, nasty crap just to watch him squirm.”

Randy stared at Chenco in open admiration for several seconds. “Crescencio Ortiz, I want to fucking have your baby.”

Chenco grinned, a wicked split of his lips. “Bend over and I’ll give you one.”

Everyone laughed, and Chenco eased now that his story was out. He’d found his real family, the people who he was just discovering, who Steve knew even after this one night would lay down just about anything to help. Steve watched the connection unfold, glad for his friends, glad for Chenco.

He tried to tamp down the part of himself that wanted to join in, find a place in the happy family too.

At three thirty they headed for bed, and when Steve suggested Chenco stay over, he didn’t fight. Steve gave him the last open bedroom, ignoring the quiet invitation in Chenco’s gaze, then went downstairs to clean up.

Randy was in the kitchen, nursing a whiskey neat. He raised it in toast as Steve sat beside him. “Job well done tonight, Monk. Though from the look of things, we might have to get you a new nickname soon.”

Steve reached for his packet and papers and rolled a cigarette. No, he shouldn’t be turning in his cowl. But Jansen was right. He wanted to.

Randy ran a finger around the rim of his glass. “Haven’t discussed it with Mitch yet, but I’m figuring we’ll be staying longer now than originally planned. This okay with you?”

With a nod, Steve tucked the packet into his pocket and lit up. “Stay as long as you need.”
Bring Chenco over as much as you can.

“Can’t help but wonder where he’s going to end up living. He doesn’t sound like he’s made any alternative plans yet. Looks to me he could use some help finding a place. Probably has friends here somewhere, but staying with them doesn’t answer the long-term. Which somebody’s got to consider, even if the kid won’t.”

This was his cue, Steve knew, to say it was okay for Chenco to stay at the hacienda, to offer to help Randy find a place for Chenco to live full-time. This was when he could confess he was interested in maybe Chenco staying here after the others had left, with or without the hanky-panky.