ONE
The phone rang, jangling on the very edges of Sam’s nerves, already worn down almost to the breaking point. Once more, he was forced to lower the pages of his graphic novel, the bright colors giving way to the rather more depressing shades of gray and dirty silver that made up his reality.
“Damn it,” he hissed softly and then immediately winced when he saw, with the worst possible timing, the town’s one and only mechanic walk into the room from the little work area in the back. The man who had walked in just in time to hear Sam’s comment, and the man who just so happened to be Sam’s boss.
“You got something better to do than your damn job?” Mike, the mechanic, drawled, his voice calm but his eyes stormy and flashing with annoyance. Which honestly, Sam couldn’t put his finger on a time when they hadn’t looked like that, at least when Mike was looking at him.
“No?” Sam tried, marking his place carefully and letting the pages of his book slip closed. Clearly, he wasn’t going to get time to finish the issue he was on just now. He could remember a time when he’d gotten to spend pretty much every work day reading, answering the occasional call, but those times had changed.
The little town itself had changed. When Sam had come to live with his brother twelve years ago, it had been a tiny place, under two thousand people. Now, it was more than twice that, as people had to leave Austin and other big cities to try to find more affordable places to live.
All of which meant, Sam’s cushy job wasn’t quite as easy as it had once been. It meant he was more often called upon to do the work which he disliked most about his job, the part where he got his hands dirty. Answering the phone wasn’t so bad, but having to crawl under a dirty car and get oil dripped on him?
Yeah, he knew very well what he would prefer. And so when the phone jangled at him again, this time he reached for it and answered it, with one eye on his boss, who wasn’t even pretending not to look at him.
“Mike’s Auto Repair,” he rapped out smartly and then frowned when he saw a familiar car pulling up into the small parking lot through the smudged plate glass windows. His face seemed to freeze when he saw two figures inside of it, one of them an adult man in his early thirties, the other a child, not quite a teenager.
Great. This was absolutely the last thing he needed right now. Fighting down a surge of frustration, he looked away from the window and tried to focus on the phone which he held to his ear. At first, the voice jabbering away at him didn’t make much sense to him, as focused as he was on his boss and on the car he’d just seen pull up.
“No, I don’t know why your car would be making a noise like that,” Sam tried to keep his voice from sounding absent, but he was pretty sure he failed utterly. “Have you tried …?”
He stopped dead, though, because he really had no idea what could be done for a rattling noise in the engine of a car. And Mike was glaring daggers at him like he should somehow magically know. It wasn’t like he’d gone to mechanic school or whatever, so it seemed a little unfair.
More jabbering in his ear was interrupted by the cheery ring of the silver bell which hung over the door to let them know when a customer came in. Sam closed his eyes and sent out a fervent prayer to anyone who would listen that the ground would open right up under him and send him hurtling away from this situation which was doubtless going to get awkward.
Well, more awkward than it already was, anyway.
“Give me that,” Mike grumped, snagging the phone out of Sam’s hand. “You deal with your dad.”
That only made Sam wince and feel worse than ever. His dad? The blue-eyed, dark-haired man who walked in seemed far too young to be anyone’s dad. At least anyone who was an adult, as Sam was.
“He’s not my …” Sam started and then turned his attention to the delicate, small man who walked in, one slender arm around the twelve-year-old blonde girl who gazed around her with eyes the same shade of summer sky blue as the man.
Not his father. Not even close. Not that Sam knew who his father was, but it wasn’t this man, that was for sure. Nor even this man’s husband, Sam’s big brother, Ben. Sure, Sam had been raised from the age of eight by them, but that didn’t make them his fathers.
“Isaac,” Sam said and then turned to look at the little girl, who looked at him with a solemn face and eyes that danced and giggled with mischief. There was a strong family resemblance between her and the man by her side, as there should be. He was, after all, her older brother. “Hey, Ruby. What’s up, kiddo?”
Ruby’s vivid little face mobilized and she poked out her tongue at him. She might be almost a teenager, and older than Sam had been when he’d left Austin to come to live with his big brother, but she still seemed like such a child to him.
“Don’t call me kiddo,” she grumbled, and Sam couldn’t even help the fond smile that crossed his face. He really liked her. She was a pain in the ass, but she was still sort of nice to have around, even if she wasn’treallyhis little sister.
God, his family was fucked up.
“Hello, Sam,” Isaac greeted him, and Sam fought back a sigh. Isaac was a good man. He couldn’t deny that, and he wouldn’t try. But there was no doubt that the relationship between Isaac and Ben had caused some problems for Sam while he was growing up. As much as he reluctantly liked Isaac, he would have much rather seen his big brother hook up with some nice, socially acceptable girl.
This was Texas. And even if, over the years, the small town where they all lived had come to accept the open secret of Ben and Isaac’s marriage, even if the fiction which had once protected them had worn away and people had more or less accepted it, that didn’t mean it was really okay. Not in this part of the world.
Or that’s the way Sam had always felt, and he’d certainly always found people to agree with him on that. He’d never quite been able to get around the strange feeling when he saw Isaac and Ben together, though he knew very well that they were blissfully happy and he couldn’t begrudge them that.
“Hey, Isaac,” Sam returned, and arched an eyebrow at the other man, waiting. He hadn’t just dropped by for no reason. He was pretty sure about that. “Uh, what’s up?”
Ruby wandered around, poking at things, and Sam watched her warily. When she was younger, she had been a big one for making messes, but she was twelve now, right? She probably wasn’t going to be too much of a pain in the butt. He hoped, considering he was very aware that his boss was still there. Sure, Mike was on the phone, having lapsed into a language of mechanics that Sam had no real idea how to decipher, but Sam knew very well that he was watching everything that happened like a hawk.
“The car needs an oil change, I think. It’s been awhile,” Isaac admitted, and Sam looked at him suspiciously. The way the guy avoided his eye, there was definitely something more going on there. Isaac had never been very good at hiding things.
“Okay. An oil change. I can do that,” Sam said, relieved. Behind him, he heard Mike drop the phone back into the cradle, and the humiliating sound of his snort of derision.
“Yeah. At least you can do that, even if you can’t do nothing else,” Mike grumbled, and Sam’s cheeks burned. To be spoken to like that at all was bad enough, but for it to happen in front of Isaac, that was a bit much to take.
