“I am, kiddo.”Ian’s voice sounded strained.
Sam kissed him on the neck as they left the room, and heard Nik ask Jurgen, “How come you never carry me to bed anymore?”Then he shrieked, “Put me down!”
Sam laid his head on Ian’s shoulder and yawned.“I wanna know about Miller.”
Ian kissed his forehead.“He’ll be all right.You can find out more in the morning.Now you’re going to bed.”
“Oh.’Kay.”Sam was asleep before his butt touched the mattress.
In the morning, Sam felt surprisingly good.Yes, his head still hurt, but not as much as he would have expected, if he’d actually been sober enough to expect anything.He felt mildly hungover—Ian said it was probably from the “good drugs” and offered Sam more.Sam turned them down.Ian told him to stay in bed and went off to make breakfast.
Then Nik, hungover for an entirely different reason, came into the room and flopped on the bed next to Sam with a groan.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine, I’ll be fine.”Nik waved a lazy hand in the air.“We’re leaving soon, but I wanted to tell you about Miller.”
“All right” had been a bit of a white lie.Miller was still in the hospital, and he’d had emergency surgery for internal bleeding.
“He also has a couple broken ribs.I found this out from his parents.”Nik hugged his middle, staring at the wall.“They don’t seem okay with the possibility that Miller’s gay,” he added.
“Oh, no.”
Nik sighed.“Yeah.”
He and Jurgen left soon after that, and Sam ate breakfast in bed.By afternoon he felt better, almost normal.It turned out fightingdidmake one horny.When Ian came to lie down next to him, Sam had a few ideas in mind for working through that.
The look on Ian’s face stopped him from suggesting them.For the first time Sam could remember, Ian rolled over and backed into his body, silently asking to be held.Once Sam had his arms around Ian, he started talking about his family.
“My brothers are a lot older than me.They were six and seven when I was born, so when Mom died they were twenty-one and twenty-two.She was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was fourteen, and she didn’t even live a year after that.”
Sam squeezed Ian tighter to his chest, holding him with everything he had.His penis wanted in on the act, but Sam made it behave.Sort of.
“I didn’t even realize my dad was an asshole until after she died,” Ian was saying.“I mean, before Mom was diagnosed, I was more into my friends than my family.Then she got sick, and it was all about her, for me.”
Sam had been debating how to ask this, but he decided to be blunt.“Did he love your mother?”
Ian nodded immediately, tickling Sam’s nose with his hair.“Beth, Jurgen’s mom—she’s Dad’s youngest sister—she told me he fell in love with Mom the minute they met and never stopped loving her.Always looked that way to me.”
“I guess even assholes love,” Sam said philosophically.
Ian snorted.“Yeah, there’s plenty of evidence in the world to support that.My brothers seem to love their wives.”
“Your brothers are assholes, too?”
“Not really, I guess.They’re just too much like my dad.”
Sam kissed the back of Ian’s neck for encouragement.And then a couple more times.
“When I was little kid, I loved my mom, you know?But I thought my dad was a hero.He wanted us, me and my brothers, to think that.It was all about how he was a firefighter and he saved people and he had this perfect wife and this perfect life, and we were going to be clones of him.But then his wife died and his youngest son was gay and didn’t really want to be a firefighter.”
Sam tightened his arm around Ian again.“He knows you’re gay?”
“I told him when I was about twenty-six, I guess.I’d known since I was nineteen, or at least I knew I was into guys.Dad was so fuckingdisappointed.Stupid thing is, I knew he would be.I went in there expecting it, but it still killed me.You know where I told him?”
Sam shook his head, even though he was pretty sure that was a rhetorical question.He relaxed again into the heat of Ian’s body and laid his palm over Ian’s heart.It was very close to his nipple.
“In his fucking office.He’d been the fire chief for about a year, and I got sick of trying to catch him someplace else.Only other place to catch him was drinking with his buddies.I don’t know if the dude ever slept at home after he became chief.Maybe they had a cot for him at the bar.”
