With little ceremony, I scoop him up, startled by how little he weighs, as if he’s made of Styrofoam and Bakelite. Still, he’s impressively toned for an old guy.
Now that he’s standing on his own two feet, he wipes himself off and pins me with a look. “So, what are you gonna do about this Roly business?”
I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. “I—not sure what you’re talking about.”
Oooh,mistake.
Whatever he hadn’t turned to ash with his first searing look has been obliterated with his second glare. I might need some aloe for this burn.
“You know as well as I do that his family has him on lockdown as far as work is concerned. I don’t see why you are passing up this perfectly good opportunity to get your hands on him. He’s got his evenings free, and you should be hitting that on the regular.”
That’s why I keep on missing him; I only come by in the evenings.
I close one of my eyes and scrunch my nose at him, confused. One of the first things that Elijah warned me about was that Morris, while mostly harmless, isn’t exactly what you call an LGBTQ-friendly kind of person. He has respect for people’s service, but that’s about the limit of it. And here I am, a big old bi-bear with no service record to speak of. Still, he’s looking up at me like he’s expecting a response. Not sure why, but I figure… might as well be honest with someone.
“I don’t think Roly is looking for the kind of relationship that I’m looking for.”
“What kind of relationship are you looking for? Are you into the BDSM or poly-what’s-its-face or something?”
“No,” I say, laughing out loud, completely unable to help it. “I’m not into that at all. I’m very much a one-partner kind of man, and I don’t think that long-term monogamy is Roly’s style.”
The old man gestures at me dismissively. “Psh. He totally wants the white picket fence and the two point five kids and the dog. He tries to act like he’s above it all, but I see how he looks at everybody. All these folks falling in love here, he sees it, and he knows he wants it, too.”
I’m skeptical. “How would you know that?”
“Sonny, I’ve been around a very, very long time. I’ve been with my Maggie longer than most of you have been alive, and I know the joys of being with that one person who’s special to you. And I know Roly. Whatever he went through in the sandbox messed him up, but it also made him grow as a person. I’m pretty sure he’ll always be a little too much, but what that man needs is to have all of those facets of his personality appreciated, noticed, and loved. I’m not sure that you’re good enough for him, but if you’re holding back because you don’t think he wants it, then you’re as big an idiot as he is. He wants it—he’s always wanted it.”
This… isnotwhat I was expecting from Morris.
“Old man, I’ve got three girls. I can’t be with somebody who isn’t serious about a relationship. I’m not looking for someone I can just date on Saturday nights and then go back to the dad existence alone. I want somebody who’s going to be in it with me.”
Holy cow, this look is worse than the first two combined. I go to my mental Amazon shopping cart and add some lidocaine.
“You just don’t pay attention, do you? Youdoknow what the intervention was about, right?”
“I don’t know, something about him getting in everyone’s business.”
Morris raises an impressively hairy eyebrow at me, his face not buying what I’m selling.
I let out a big breath and shake my head, wishing I could have avoided this conversation ten minutes ago. “Yeah, I know. He was doing too much. I saw the numbers, and the backpay amount they gave him was huge. He was so mad about it that he turned around and split it amongst all of the charities he’s been helping. But yeah, it was a lot of hours.”
“Do you know the numbers he was pulling down at the worst of it?”
“Never really worked out the math.”
The old guy looks at me like it was my fault. “Ninety-eight hours per week, and that was just the stuff they paid him for. Didn’t include the charity work. Certainly didn’t include the amount he used to get around. I’m guessing he didn’t sleep very much.”
I tried very hard not to fixate on the fact that Morris spoke about Roly’s “getting around” in the past tense, and instead focused on the average number hours he’d sustained formonths. It takes my breath away. I think about every unkind thing I’d said to him, and a lot of it centered around me thinking that he didn’t care, which is the same as accusing him of being lazy. It simply wasn’t true. “That’s insane.”
“Exactly. And that’s on top of the TBI.”
He said it like a throwaway line, but it was a test, and the shock I felt meant that I’d failed it.
“When did Roly ever have a traumatic brain injury?”
“The Martinezes never talk about it, but he took a bad blow the temple when he was kidnapped. A fair number of the people who walk through those doors have experienced some kind of concussion, but this wasn’t that. They’d cracked his skull, then kept him tied to a chair for three days. Did you know that he has a hard time with names? That he’ll always have minor memory problems?”
I shake my head, regret like a rock in my gut. I have the strongest instinct to search Roly out and put my arms around him. I bet if I did that, he’d pop me in the jaw, and I’d deserve it.
