Rare, page 1
Copyright
Published by
Dreamspinner Press
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Suite 2, PMB# 279
Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886
USA
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Rare
© 2014 Garrett Leigh.
Cover Art
© 2014 G.D. Leigh.
Blackjazzdesign@gmail.com
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.
ISBN: 978-1-62798-293-1
Digital ISBN: 978-1-62798-292-4
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
January 2014
Dedication
For Big G and the Mini Gs, as ever, with love…
Acknowledgments
Paula, Nic, and Carla… partners in crime :)
Loss of brain function can occur even without much visible damage.
Eleven little words that struck a fear in me beyond any fear I’d ever felt before. Inside I was cowed in the corner, screaming, and yet somehow, I was still by his side.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Ash
PETE HAD been busy while I’d been gone. I stood in front of the shiny new door to his apartment and wondered for a moment if I’d come home to the right place. Then I remembered the coarse message he’d sent me a few days ago, telling me in no uncertain terms what a bitch the new door had been to fit. A separate message—perhaps an afterthought—told me he’d left a key on top of the frame.
I reached for it and turned it over in my hand. It was silver and shiny. The old one was battered brass, bruised and familiar. It felt heavy in my pocket as I slid the new key into the lock. I considered the fate of the old key now that the door it belonged to was no longer there. Pete said I pondered the strangest things.
The new door swung open with a whisper. It felt odd after two years with a door that crunched like a gearbox. The new door was like a ghost, all shimmery and silent. I wasn’t sure I liked it.
A wry grin crept over my face. Really? Four days without Pete and you’re worried about a door? I took a tentative step forward. The door closed with a quiet click, and this time, I paid it no heed.
I glanced around the apartment. It was quiet and still. No TV, stereo, or signs of life. That was no surprise. I was a few hours early. Despite hating every moment of the flight between Chicago and Philadelphia, I’d caught an earlier plane home. Pete wasn’t expecting me, but I could feel in my bones that he was home. The invisible cord between us pulled me along, and a minute later, I found him passed out in our bed. He was asleep on his stomach, something he only did when he was alone or too tired to notice. It used to make me uneasy—sometimes it still did—but not today. Today his bare back was exactly what I needed to see. I sat down by his head and brushed my fingers over his stubbly jaw. He didn’t stir, even when I leaned down and breathed in the clean smell of his skin.
His back caught my attention again. I loved his back, perhaps because I so rarely got to see it like this—naked and still. A while ago he’d considered getting some new ink on his back, something small on his shoulder, but I’d refused to do it. I’d draw him anything he wanted, anywhere he wanted—just not there. His back was amazing—smooth, olive-brown, and flawless. It didn’t need anything else.
I leaned down and pressed a soft kiss between his shoulder blades. Dr. Gilbert, the therapist who had the pleasure of dissecting my messed-up brain, told me every week that I should do the things I wanted to do—trust myself to do them—before I overthought them. I’d wanted to kiss Pete’s back for years. Now seemed as good a time as any.
His warm skin felt good, so good I did it again, and again, until he began to stir. I pulled back and waited as his arm fumbled for me, but he didn’t open his eyes. Instead, he rumbled out a chuckle that came from deep in his belly.
“I must be fucking dreaming if you just did what I think you did.”
His voice was gruff and sleepy, but it had been four days since I’d heard it. My chest felt warm. “Open your eyes and see.”
He didn’t answer with words. Instead, he rolled over and pulled me on top of him. I went willingly and kissed him until he needed to breathe. When he pulled away, he noticed how damp my clothes were. I’d gotten caught in the rain on the walk from the L, one of those autumn showers that washed away the humidity and made everything smell fresh and clean. I liked that kind of rain; it felt good on my face. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to get home, I would have stood in it longer.
Pete shoved me away, feigning irritation, but his sleepy eyes belied his humor. “You’re soaked.”
He blinked a couple of times and rubbed his face like he wasn’t entirely awake. I laid my forehead against his and laughed. It felt so good to be home.
Beneath me, Pete shifted. He was half-asleep, but I knew what he wanted. Since the first time I’d ever laid a hand on him, he’d always been a sucker for skin-to-skin contact. He tugged on my shirt with clumsy hands, and I was more than happy to pull it over my head. He stilled when he had me where he wanted me, and his breathing became deep and even again. I raised my head from the crook of his neck and eyed him. I felt like I needed to get closer, like I could climb inside his skin and still not be close enough. After a moment of deliberation, I reached for the one part of him that was definitely awake.
Pete was the master of the slow, torturous fuck. The way he played my body was something I still couldn’t quite believe. It wasn’t often I caught him in the mood to be on the receiving end, but as I watched him drift in that hazy world between awake and asleep, I knew that now was my chance to indulge him. I worked him over real slow with my hand. He hummed and shifted a few times, but when he came it was with a quiet sigh, and he was snoring again before I’d even let go of his dick.
It was mesmerizing to see him unconsciously unravel. I could have watched him for hours, but as I stared at his beautiful sleeping form, something in the back of my mind refused to rest. I ignored it for as long as I could, but the call in my head was persistent, so loud there was only one way to silence it. I kissed Pete’s chest and lingered over the biggest star he had etched on his skin, the one right over his heart, before I got up and left him. I padded through the apartment and retrieved my sketchbook from the bag I’d dumped by the door. Like fate, the book fell open to the most recent drawing I’d done of the mysterious baby girl who haunted my sketches. I stared at her, like her face could tell me what I needed to know, but the antsy feeling under my skin persisted until I turned the page on her face and my pencil touched clean paper.
Like so many times before, I was lost then, detached from my surroundings until the scratching of lead on the page petered out. Relieved, I felt better as I sat back and scrutinized the unfamiliar face of the young woman. The way I’d drawn her made her seem like a mystical princess. The brief time I’d spent in Philadelphia already felt like a lifetime ago, and in the darkening early evening, it was hard to believe she was the same girl I’d seen this morning. I had no doubt it was her, though. I’d recognize her anywhere. Her image would be imprinted on my brain forever, because she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
CHAPTER TWO
Pete
I COULDN’T believe how long four days could seem. There’d been times in the past when the world had stood still—long days at work and never-ending night shifts—but the four days Ash spent in Philadelphia were the longest four days of my life.
It felt different from the three weeks he’d been missing last winter. If someone had told me back then it was possible for me to love him more, I’d have laughed my ass off. Shit like that was ridiculous, right? Yeah, more fool me. Ash wasn’t the same man who’d run away from me back then, and if the past year or so had taught me anything, it was that whatever life threw at us, there was always room for me to love him a little bit more.
And four days without him was the ultimate lesson.
Being without him was torture and it drove me quietly mad, even to the point where I’d dreamed about him coming home early, kissing my back, and jacking me off. At least, I thought I was dreaming until I stumbled out of the bedroom to find him on the couch, shirtless, chewing on his favorite pencil.
He sensed my presence, shoved his sketchbook into its customary place under the couch, and turned to face me.
His lazy grin was fucking amazing.
I glanced at the window, gauging the time. It was still light. For the first time in his life, he was early. “How long have you been home?”< br />
“Long enough.”
His smirk remained, and I realized I’d been conscious enough at some point for my dirty dreams to become reality.
Damn.
I stared at him for a long moment. I felt like I should throw my arms around him and tell him how much I’d missed him, but I didn’t. Instead, I mumbled some shit about needing a shower and held out my hand. He took it without hesitation, and after I’d undressed him, he stood with his palms flat on the tiled wall while I reacquainted myself with his body. It wasn’t sexual—the time for that would come later—and it wasn’t that I’d forgotten every muscle, scar, and perfect flaw I had mapped in my head. It had just been four long days. I needed to put my hands on him, and hold him under the spray until the water ran cold.
Later, Ash unpacked while I got dressed. He threw a balled-up hoodie at me. “What do you want to do tonight?”
I pulled some socks over my feet. It was the first time I’d been able to in days. Somehow, he’d taken every pair we owned away with him. “Whatever you want is fine.”
He slung some more dirty clothes across the room and retrieved a T-shirt out of the dresser. After he’d slipped it over his head, he shrugged. “Are you working tomorrow?”
“Yeah, at dawn, so don’t let me get drunk.”
Ash snorted. It had been quite some time since either of us had gotten tanked. He’d been on and off various prescription drugs, and I hadn’t been in the mood. It was hard to go wild when the person you loved was going through hell.
“Do you want to walk around and get some food?”
He knew me so well. It was the middle of September and summer had ended weeks ago, but the weather was still warm enough to make aimless wandering around the city one of my favorite things to do. Add in some downtime with Ash and the chance to fill my belly, and I was a happy man. “Sure,” I said. “You ready?”
We ambled along the streets, shooting the breeze and catching up. I didn’t have much to tell him, because despite knowing he didn’t want me to, I’d spent the majority of the past four days at work. I’d played pool with Joe one night, but that was about it, and Ash wasn’t fooled by my halfhearted efforts to conceal it; he rolled his eyes and moved on. We’d walked all the way to the south of Lincoln Park when I finally asked him what he’d got up to in Philadelphia.
Ash didn’t hear my question; he was too busy staring at one of the street vendors left over from the Saturday market. Spellbound, I watched him observe the old man carving a lump of wood into a wolf. We didn’t talk about art much, but I knew he loved street art. It was one of the reasons we often ended up in this part of town. He could watch the artists at work for hours, and I had almost as much fun watching him do it.
Not many photos existed of the chalk drawings he used to scrawl on the streets of Philadelphia. I’d only seen a few. His lifestyle back then hadn’t exactly accommodated photography, so I had to rely on people who’d known him to show me, and there were even less of them than there were photographs. He worked as a tattoo artist now, and his life had changed beyond belief, but seeing him so fascinated by the artists here in Chicago often made me wonder if he’d ever go back to his roots.
I nudged him in the ribs, inclining my head toward the finished carving. “Do you like that one?”
“Hmm?”
“The carving,” I repeated. “Do you like it?”
Ash turned away from the vendor with an absent shrug. “Yeah, I saw one like that in Philly, but the kid had different wood.”
I let the silence hang as we resumed our wandering. The purpose of his trip to back to Philadelphia was still a mystery to me. Once I’d gotten over my shock that he was willing to get on a plane, I’d worried that revisiting the city would dredge up unhappy memories for him, but it wasn’t until he was actually gone that my imagination had gotten the better of me. I was half expecting him to come home reverted to the mess he’d been a year ago. He hadn’t, but I knew there was something he hadn’t told me, and now he seemed so happily distracted by the wood carver, I didn’t have the heart to ask him.
In the end, it turned out I didn’t have to. As the frown creased my forehead, he stopped walking and pointed toward a Mexican canteen. “Buy me a burrito and I’ll tell you what else I saw in Philly.”
IT TOOK him a while to get his story out. No matter how much time passed, talking about himself never got any easier. I listened as he explained how he’d ended up standing a few feet away from the girl named in his child services file as his sister. When he was done, I picked up my beer and took a long, slow pull, buying time to cover my shock. “Are you sure it was her?”
“Nope, but Ellie said it was her, and she….” He stopped for a moment as he figured out what he wanted to say. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “It sounds messed up, but she didn’t seem real.”
It didn’t sound messed up to me. When I’d told him he had a sister, a part of him hadn’t seemed all that surprised, but there was something else too. Disbelief, and something… more. Had he known all along and buried it with everything else he’d been through? Hell, we’d probably never know. Back then, he wouldn’t even let me tell him her name, like he thought he didn’t deserve to know. I wondered if that had changed, but I sensed it wasn’t the time to ask him.
I shifted so my leg brushed his. “How did Ellie even know she existed?”
It was a fair question. Ellie was Ash’s best friend—his only friend when he’d been homeless on the streets of Philadelphia—but though they sometimes seemed like siblings, he didn’t confide in her about the bad shit: the kind of shit that pushed him into a psychotic breakdown. Ellie didn’t know the half of what Ash had been through since she’d persuaded him to follow her here to Chicago all those years ago.
Ash rolled his eyes. “She went snooping in her dad’s office and found a page of my file he hadn’t given to Dr. Gilbert.”
I knew which page he meant. It had to be the same one I’d handed back to Ellie’s father a few months back, asking him to safeguard it in case Ash ever changed his mind about wanting to know his sister. I was curious as to why David had left it lying around his office, but I didn’t have it in me to be pissed at him. Ash seemed at peace with what he’d seen, and we’d rebuilt enough trust between us for me to believe him.
My cell phone beeped. I pulled it out to open the message I knew was from Joe.
Lock the door if ur gettin nekkid. Be over in the morning. J
I grinned, handing the phone to Ash for him to reply. In his own way, Joe had been as worried about Ash’s trip as me, but the few hours I’d spent with him while Ash had been gone had done me the world of good. Joe had his own way of looking at things, and despite Ash’s worries that I didn’t like him, over the past year or so we’d become good friends.
Aside from doctors and therapists, Joe was the only person who knew the reasons behind the breakdown Ash had been through. When I’d had to go back to work in the days after we’d discovered the probability of sexual abuse in Ash’s past, I’d had little choice but to tell him. Given the mess Ash was in, there was no way he could be left alone. I needed help to care for him, and knowing he would never forgive me if I put that on Ellie, Joe was the only option I had.
I remembered the day I begged him for help with perfect clarity. His reaction had mirrored mine: horror, anger, and grief for the childhood Ash never had. I’d been taken aback by the raw emotion in him, but what stunned me most was the story he told me in return. It was something I’d never forget.
I’d always known there was something about Joe. He was an open and honest kind of guy, but underneath it all something lingered—a deep sadness he couldn’t quite hide. When he told me about his brother, Larry, I finally understood what it was, and his gentle, fraternal protection of Ash made sense.
Larry had been just fifteen when Joe left Seattle to go to college in Philadelphia. His parents had been against the move and pleaded with him to stay closer to home, but he’d ignored them and gone anyway. He was a free spirit at heart. His family could trace their roots back to the Romany Gypsies in Eastern Europe, and he’d inherited their itchy feet. He wanted to travel and see the world. He wanted to live outside the small community he’d grown up in.
