1 Chapter 1
1
It was almost ten P.M. when Ben Haggerty stepped out of the elevator. He had to lean against the wall, needing a minute to dredge up the energy it would take to complete the final steps to his home. He’d been on the job since seven in the morning. Twelve hour days were becoming the norm, but those extra three hours had wiped him out. The emergency call from one of the company’s most important clients had taken up the afternoon and a large part of the evening, and the job still wasn’t finished. He’d need to be back at work first thing tomorrow morning,
Twenty feet to the door to the apartment he shared with his boyfriend; he could do this.
He drew in a breath and blew it out before pushing off from the wall. He moved down the corridor in more of a shuffle than a walk. Even if Rick, his boyfriend of seven years, had something heating in the Crock-Pot, Ben didn’t think he’d be able to eat a bite. Worse than that, if Rick wanted a blowjob, Ben’d be lucky if he didn’t fall asleep in the middle of it.
He and Rick had lived together here in Greenedale for the past three years, although they’d been boyfriends since just before high school graduation…
* * * *
“We can’t tell anyone.” Rick had been unbending in that one thing, slightly deflating the euphoria of Ben’s orgasmic high.
“Okay.” He didn’t like keeping secrets from his folks, but he could understand his boyfriend wanting to keep the fact they were lovers on the down low. He’d met the aunt and uncle who’d become Rick’s guardians after his parents had been killed in a car accident when he was ten. They might not be religious, but they seemed to have a stick up their butts about gay people. Well, that was the reason behind them moving to DeKalb. Rick had told him about it one Saturday night when they’d taken Ben’s Jeep—it was really the family’s Patriot, but Dad let Ben have it so he could get around town—a bottle of Double H, the cheap whiskey Rick had pinched from the back of his uncle’s liquor cabinet, and driven to the local lover’s lane. Ben took a blanket from the cargo area of the Jeep and laid it out at the base of a spreading chestnut tree, and they’d made themselves comfortable.
* * * *
Ben had drunk beer, so it wasn’t as if he was a teetotaler; he just didn’t like the taste of this whiskey. To keep his boyfriend from discovering that, he pretended to take a sip every time Rick did, and when Rick wasn’t looking, Ben would spill it into the grass. Rick, however—he didn’t seem to have much of a head for the whiskey, and he was soon slurring his words, hiccoughing, and peering at Ben owlishly.
That could have been why he began telling Ben the reason behind his family’s relocation to DeKalb.
“That stupid fuck!” Rick spat. Even after all this time, Ben could see he was still seriously pissed. “Liam wasn’t my first boyfriend, but I’d been his, and he was all excited about it.”
“Did you like him a lot?” Ben didn’t really want to hear about the boy Rick had dated before he moved here, but he should be supportive, shouldn’t he?
“I liked him well enough,” Rick hunched a shoulder. “He was a good lay.”
Hearing Rick describe someone he was supposed to care about in such casual terms shook Ben. When Rick passed him the bottle, this time he took a slug, and he swallowed. Oh God, he shouldn’t have. It burned all the way down. He gave the bottle back to Rick and tried to conceal the fact he’d almost tossed his cookies.
“I could have understood if Liam posted it on Facebook—everyone constantly updated their status, and it didn’t matter because anyone with half a brain made sure their accounts were password protected and restricted to friends. Besides, none of their parents went on Facebook.”
“Are you sure?” Ben put passwords on all his accounts, not because he thought Ma and Dad would go snooping but just because it was good practice.
“Eh. Uncle Walter never did, and Aunt Clarice was too busy with her lunches and her clubs to pay much attention to what I did online.”
“Okay. So what happened?” Because it was obvious something had.
“Liam could have commented that he was in a relationship, or even that it was complicated.”
“What did he do?”
“The stupid fuck actually put what we’d done on paper! And of course Liam’s parents found his fucking journal.” Rick brought the bottle of Double H to his lips and took a healthy swallow. Or maybe it wasn’t too healthy, since he started choking. Ben rubbed Rick’s back, hoping to soothe him, but Rick caught his breath and shrugged Ben off.
