Beyond the Footlights, page 22
“I used to spend hours thinkin’ shit through while I plucked out basslines. Just the instrument and me. No amp even. Just feelin’ the weight of it and knowin’ there wasn’t nothin’ could take that away from me.” But somehow he had lost it. For so long. Then he’d woken up in Tanner’s bed, alone, to be sure, but he’d found the note right away, sitting on his bass case, and it had been the most natural thing in the world to take the instrument out and start plucking away. He hadn’t even had to think about it. When Vance had called to check up on him, told him about the offer he’d made to Tanner, the bass and the simple rhythmic lines of sound he could make with it kept him from falling apart at the thought that Tanner hadn’t been the one to tell him.
His eyes began to sting and he cleared his throat, jerked a hand over his face to stop the heat prickling up through him and leaking out his eyes. “Don’t know what happened to that….”
“I fucking know what happened to that.”
“You weren’t there. You don’t know Jacko like I do. He needs attention. Needs someone servin’—”
“He needs to get his head out of his ass and realize taking away your music, your outlet, your freedoms, one by one isn’t the way to get you to focus on him. He stopped you being you so he could make you over into what he needed. So fuck him. He doesn’t get to do that to a person any more than I do. Did.” His breath hitched and he swore quietly. “I know this, Kil. I know it, because it’s what I had to see I was doing to Trev—trying to make him into the guy who could keep me. The guy I could control so I didn’t have to feel afraid all the time. So I could feel like I wouldn’t get left alone to deal with the shit Ace did to me. I didn’t have to deal with anything as long as I was focused on controlling Trev. I didn’t know I was doing it. I didn’t mean to, or even want that for him. I just—I was scared and hurting, and I made what I needed more important than what he needed, or even who he was and what he had to give. I forced what I needed out of him, and it broke him in ways I am very lucky Stan seems able to help him fix.”
Len forced Kilmer to look into his eyes, lifting his face, waiting until Kilmer focused on him. “I don’t want that for you. Looking back, I can see it. It happened every time Jacko spoke to you. You shut down a bit of your light, like if it shined too bright, it might expose his cracks and you were too kind to let that happen in public. And when he did his own bullshit that showed how broken he was, he took that out on you too. It should have stopped a long time ago. And he should have been the one to stop it. He had all the power.”
“Oh, Len.” Kilmer touched fingers to Len’s flushed cheek, like he could wipe away too-high color to expose the honest freckles his flush was covering up. “You know that’s not how these things work. A Dom only has as much power as we let them have.”
“Or as much as a broken one can force from you. Or cajole, or trick away. If you think you were in any position that night to stop what was happening, then you still don’t get it. Sure, maybe you had his spoken permission to say no, but could you have denied him? Really? Doesn’t matter what he said to you. If you felt like you could have stopped something happening you didn’t like, you would have stopped it. You stopped Vance from walking out on me because you felt it was right to stop him, so I know you can speak up if you really have to. So why didn’t you that night? What stopped you?”
“I was mad—I—”
“You don’t have to tell me anything.” Len squared his shoulders and held out a hand to ease Kilmer to his feet. “Just think about it. What stopped you from speaking up to save yourself? Because whatever you say, I know what it’s like to be in a place where you want to say no and choose not to. What do you call that?” He shrugged and hefted the wheelbarrow. “I have no idea, but it isn’t nothing, Kil. It matters that you figure that out. Before Tanner.”
Kilmer watched him walk away, thoughts swimming.
Before Tanner what?
24
TANNER COULDN’T put his finger of what had awakened him. He sat up in bed and peered through the darkness. A pale orange smolder from the streetlights fumed in around the edges of blackout curtains that were pulled taught and still fell just short of the window frames. He closed his eyes to shut out the distraction so he could listen.
A vague thrumming vibrated through the paper-thin wall of the roadside motel-cum-slum apartment building where he had agreed, for some reason he still didn’t quite understand, to meet Jacko. The motel stood about a mile out of town, and he still paid rent on the place, again for reasons he didn’t quite understand now that he had a perfectly nice home.
Maybe because the house had been his parents’, then his mother’s for years after his father had died. They had bought it as a scrappy little mess, and his father had painstakingly restored and rebuilt it one tiny detail at a time. Despite the work Tanner had put into it since he’d inherited it, the place still felt empty; not like the home he remembered.
Well. Until he’d woken up to sunshine on the sheets, splashing across Kilmer, and he’d realized there was no possible way he would ever have brought Kilmer back here. Not like some of his one-night stands, whom he hadn’t been able to imagine in his house.
“I am so fucked up,” he muttered. He needed to ditch this place. But then, if he had, Jacko would have gone where exactly? Not that he had told Tanner he’d been squatting in his old place. He hadn’t found out until the landlord had called Tuesday afternoon to ask if he knew there was an “old dude with a motorcycle playing his guitar at all hours” staying in his room. Tanner had figured it out immediately and assured him he knew, then left Jacko a voice message telling him to keep the noise down or get the hell out.
Jacko had replied the next day and asked Tanner to meet with him Friday night. So here he was, so exhausted from working at Kilmer’s house and stressing over trying to figure out how to tell Kilmer he knew where Jacko was that he’d fallen asleep waiting for the asshole.
So what had awakened him, he wondered. It wasn’t something he could hear, but he felt it in his bones. As quickly as he pinpointed it, it faded, like a car with too much bass passing on the highway outside. He would have shrugged it off and gone back to sleep, but it came again, rising and falling in a wave that stirred his marrow and started a shiver that rippled through to his extremities.
“The hell?” He tossed back the comforter, sat up, and scooted to the edge of the bed. The cold metal of the pullout-couch frame seared a hard chill across the backs of his knees and dug into the undersides of his thighs as he hefted over it and up. He padded across rough carpet to the window. There was nothing to see when he peered out. The row of parking spots below his front balcony were filled with a ragtag group of vehicles belonging to his neighbors in squalor. Nothing out of the ordinary. He let the curtain fall back and scratched at the sleep-sweat crusting around his balls and pubes. “Fucking kids probably.” Or a motorcycle on the highway.
Barefoot near the door, he felt more than heard the uneven stomp of feet coming up the steps and frowned. Had Jacko finally decided to show his sorry ass? He had his hand on the door and was leaning to look out the peephole when a fist banged against it, jarring his entire body.
Outside all he could see was the top of a balding pate fringed with gray scruff of someone braced with one hand on his door. He rhythmically hammered a heavy tattoo for admittance with the other.
“Tanner? Dude, you in there?”
“Jacko?”
“Yeah.” There was a pause, then, “You up?”
“I am now,” Tanner muttered and threw the chain and flipped the deadbolt. He opened the door, then shuffled the few steps back to the bed for his jeans. He was still pulling them on when the room shuddered with the closing of the door.
He turned at the sound of a heavy clunk and scrape, and then Jacko grunted as his ass hit the mat, his back against the door. “Thank f’r lettin’ me in.” The words were too loud, but Jacko shushed himself before Tanner got a chance to.
Tanner tilted his head, trying to see Jacko’s face better. “Are you drunk?”
Jacko reached into his denim jacket and pulled out a paper bag that clearly held a mickey. Tanner could smell the sharp tang of alcohol across the room.
Jacko lifted his bottle in a wavering toast, then took a long swallow. “S’pose so.”
The rumbling noise he’d heard clicked in his brain, and Tanner realized it had been a motorcycle circling the motel to park at the back. “And you drove?” Asshole!
Jacko didn’t drink, at least not often, and Tanner had never seen him drink to excess. He wasn’t sure what to do with the inebriated man and was tempted to leave him where he sat, let him pass out there, and go back to bed himself. It wasn’t his problem really. None of this was his problem. Except when he thought about how Kilmer had looked, hands splayed against the cool window, cheeks flushed, gaze unfocused and a little desperate, as Tanner touched him, tamed him, and brought him off. He remembered the chain around his neck and the squashed bell, and fury flared up in him. He quelled it quickly. It wasn’t going to fix anything to punch Jacko in the face, much as he was tempted to do just that.
“Gone and made it my problem, haven’t I?”
“Huh?” Jacko peered up at him. “What’d you say?”
Tanner stared down at him, the impact of their reality slamming into him. He’d slept with Jacko’s—what? Ex-submissive? Ex-boyfriend?
“Fuck me.” With a sigh, he held out a hand. “Get off the floor.”
“Like it here.”
“Don’t be an asshole.” He kept his hand out until Jacko finally accepted.
It took some doing to get him steady on his feet, and it didn’t last long. He only staggered to the bed and slopped back down. He would have flung his booze over the sheets if Tanner wasn’t quick enough to snatch the bottle from him as he toppled.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, trying hard but failing to keep the annoyance from his voice. “It’s the middle of the night. I’ve been waiting for hours.”
“Where else was I gonna go?” Jacko glanced around the small room, and his gaze fell on the pile of dirty clothes spilling out of a canvas rucksack. “Sorry I didn’t—” He belched. “—ask first. Thought you’d be cool with it, since you have that pretty little house now.”
Tanner pulled his coffeemaker from the back of the counter and dumped the old dregs down the sink. He also dumped the wet grinds—evidence that Jacko had been there earlier that day and had left rather than keep their date—and began to rinse everything.
“You’ve fucked around with my time enough. Tell me what you want so I can go home.” He kept his back to Jacko. It was a cheap trick, since Jacko knew full well Tanner would never hear any response with the water running. He took his time with the coffee. Maybe Jacko would have passed out by the time he was done.
When he finally turned back around, however, Jacko had righted himself and was perched on the corner of the bed, gaze bleary, mouth set in a heartbreaking line of misery. In that moment, he looked—old.
“God, Jacko.” Tanner clunked two mugs onto the counter and went over to the bed. He wanted to lecture. He wanted to rant. He wanted to be furious with the man. But he needed to understand, so he bottled his anger and spoke softly. “What happened?”
Jacko was staring at his hands, limp between his legs, and shaking his head. He glanced up just before he spoke, allowing Tanner to see his face. “It got away from me,” he whispered. “I just—” He shrugged, a helpless little gesture that made him seem so much smaller.
“Got away from you?” A tight knot began to form in his gut. “It got away from you? What the hell does that even mean?” Was Kilmer the “it” in question?
“The dog really loves him, you know. Just… loves the shit out of him.”
“I noticed.” And here was just one more piece of evidence that there was a weird and worrisome disconnect between how the world—even the damn dog—saw Kilmer and how Kilmer saw himself. What had happened to cause that? How had it happened?
Silence, thick and filled with too many heavy-handed ways to start an uncomfortable conversation, fell into the spaces around them.
The room heated up when the building’s furnace kicked in and Jacko grumbled, stripping out of his thick leather jacket. “Fuckin’ hot in here,” he muttered.
Because that was the thing uppermost in the list of complaints that needed to be voiced.
“Jacko—”
“You goin’ to lec—let—” He let out another loud belch and pounded a fist against his chest. “—lecture?”
“I’m going to ask again. What happened?”
“That night?” Jacko peered at him. His pale blue eyes were watery and unfocused. Gray stubble clouded his features. “Not sure I should—”
“Not that. I mean… that didn’t come out of the blue. You were fucking Rocky for ages, and all that time, you already had a guy? A—Jacko.” He eyed his ex-bandmate, uncertain for the moment if he dared enter the “you already had a sub” territory. For one he didn’t know exactly what the arrangement between Jacko and Kilmer had been. He could guess, but that did no one any favors if he got it wrong. For another he wasn’t entirely sure he was ready to out himself as someone who understood the dynamic, never mind that he had once lived immersed in the lifestyle.
“A—what?” Jacko swung his head around to glare at Tanner. “A boy? A brat who didn’t know his place and couldn’t be taught.” His words brimmed to overflowing with disgust. He curled a lip and slashed a hand over his mouth. “Boy had no discipline. No regard for the rules. No respect. Thought he was above—” He smeared his hand over his lips once more and grimaced. “Fuck. What am I even sayin’?”
“You’re describing a guy who doesn’t match the man I know, Jacko. I don’t know who you think he is, but undisciplined? Disrespectful? The guy runs a ranch for one of the biggest stars in entertainment. By all accounts a very financially successful spread in a shit economy. He has managed to keep the place and Ashcroft’s privacy completely intact. So whoever you think you’re talking about—do you even know him?”
“I fuckin’ lived with him for four years. I think I know.”
“And yet, until he showed up at the bar to wash you out of his system with a flood of whiskey, I never met him. We played together, formed a band. We had—I thought—a bond, and I never heard word one about you having a boyfriend.”
Jacko waved a finger in his face, side to side, and wobbled his head in echo. “Not boyfriend. Boy.”
Tanner curled a lip at the scent of alcohol burning his nostrils. “I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here, buddy, but you are so ridiculously fucked up about this, I don’t even know what to say.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
And there the discussion had to end unless Tanner came clean and explained that he definitely understood. Well. Understood the dynamic, if not what a sweet but scared and uncertain man like Kilmer had ever seen in a rough-handed, demanding, unstable Dom like Jacko. They should never have been together, and Tanner had to wonder how it had happened.
Drawing in a breath, he resigned himself. “I understand. I’ve had boys of my own over the years, Jacko. I get the dynamic, and I get it from the point of view of a man who should have protected the gift of someone else’s submission, instead of pissing all over it by fucking whatever looked more interesting or easier.”
Jacko studied him for a few heartbeats, then blew out a breath. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then tell me what it was like, because right now, I’m not in a real charitable frame of mind. You messed with something precious. Kilmer trusted you to care for him and instead you fucked him over. And you mind-fucked Rocky, who’s a sweet, innocent kid and didn’t deserve to be treated like a tool to hammer your boy with. You’re old enough and, I presume, experienced enough to know better, so what the ever-loving fuck happened?” He was close enough he could sense the miasma of neglect surrounding Jacko. But at this distance, he didn’t have to see Jacko to hear his despair.
Jacko shook his head, dropped it into his hands, and groaned. “I lost track,” he whispered. “I—lost… him.”
Silence. That wasn’t a lie. Wasn’t an explanation, but it wasn’t a lie.
“The dog really loves him.”
Tanner snorted in disgust and got up. “You already said that. I know the damn dog loves him, dotes on him, slobbers after him. All that attention should have come from you.” He watched coffee burble into the carafe, his fists clenched on the edge of the counter. Jacko wasn’t a complete moron, nor was he a bad man. They’d played together for nearly a year, and Jacko’s courtship of Rocky had been slow, at least at first, and sweet. He’d been kind.
“Did you care more about Rocky than Kilmer?” Tanner asked. The carafe slowly filled, and he breathed in the warm, dark scent, trying to calm his racing pulse and boiling anger.
“No.” And to prove he wasn’t a complete dickhead, he raised his voice enough for Tanner to hear him. “Rocky’s a good kid. He didn’t deserve me, and I hope he doesn’t take any of this to heart.”
Tanner shrugged. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Rocky. But he didn’t care about Rocky right now. “This isn’t about him, Jacko.”
“You care so much about some guy you barely know? You seem pretty hell-bent on skewerin’ me over him.”
Another roadblock in the conversation unless he decided to come clean. “I looked after his dog. He’s hired me to fix up his place, which he completely trashed because the damn dust on the shelves was all he had left of four fucking years. And you did that to him somehow, so yeah. I care enough to want to know how.”
The weight of the silence that answered him made breathing a little harder. Or that could have been the anger for this man who didn’t seemed to see or care about the damage he’d done.
“I’m just not made like what he needs,” Jacko said at last.
“Fucking bullshit.” The coffeemaker beeped, and Tanner stared at the dark liquid a moment, curling and uncurling his fingers, willing himself not to smash the carafe once he picked it up. “You didn’t take care of him.”
