xV furrowed his brow. “Jayne?”
“Yeah.” Jayne sighed. “J-A-Y-N-E. It’s… a thing in our family.”
Another silence. xV cocked his head to the side. “Jayne, Simon, Shep…” He looked over his shoulder. “And Mal?”
“Don’t even start,” Jayne, Shep, and Mal grumbled in unison.
Jayne’s lower lip trembled, resisting a laugh. He glanced at Mal, who smiled timidly in return.
Despite their rough start, Jayne had a feeling they were going to get along just fine.
* * *
The nearest unmeteredon-street parking was four blocks away from Caleb and Everett’s condo. After nearly ten minutes spent circling—five of them embellished with enough dirty language that Nikki would have called it a day with her collection—Jayne found a place to park his clunker of a minivan and headed back to the condo. The streets of downtown Aurora were familiar, so as Jayne walked, he lost himself in his thoughts instead.
Life was different here.
At first, Jayne hadn’t noticed, but now, a full week since Caleb and Everett had opened their door to him and his family, Jayne couldn’t mistake it. It didn’t come down to the quality of the water, the pollution in the air, or the caliber of people on the streets—if it had, Jayne would have put the pieces together sooner. What made this part of the city different was more subtle than that.
It was lack.
Jayne saw it on the shoulders of those he passed in the streets and the eyes of the few men and women he dared meet in passing. It lived in people’s posture and the lines of their lips, and appeared in the facades of the buildings Jayne passed on his walk back home.
Stress, grief, worry… while none of them were truly gone, they didn’t thrive here like they did by Jayne’s old apartment on Trefore Avenue. Fewer eyes were vacant, more gaits were certain, and expressions less forlorn. It was as though proximity to the downtown core remedied an unspoken, omnipresent disease that drained the life of those inflicted.
Was this what money did to people?
Jayne considered the thought as he turned onto West Madison and spotted Caleb and Everett’s high-rise down the block.
Money could never buy happiness. The old adage stuck in Jayne’s mind like a burr, irritating and almost impossible to remove. Over the last three years, he’d force-fed himself that line until it made him sick, and yet it had never changed what he knew to be true—money didn’tbuyhappiness, but possession of it provided all the right conditions for happiness to grow. People who didn’t worry about where they’d find the cash to keep the lights on didn’t lie in bed awake at night, staring through the dark as their minds tripped over numbers. People who could afford to wander into a grocery store without a list and a budget and walk out with whatever struck their fancy weren’t crippled with fear when the first of the month rolled around. While Jayne would be the first to admit that there was happiness to be found no matter an individual’s position in life, he would die defending the caveat that the longevity and impact of that happiness wouldn’t be the same.
This part of the city was different because the people in it felt safe, and for what felt like the first time since the accident that had stolen his parents’ lives, Jayne was starting to feel the same way.
On his way into the condo, Jayne offered the doorman a polite nod, then crossed the lobby to the elevator. While he waited for the cabin to arrive, he balled a fist and ran his thumb over his knuckles, wondering how long that safety might last. Caleb and Everett had been unbelievably kind, and Jayne had no reason to think that they’d pull the rug out from beneath him, but there came a time in every charitable arrangement where something had to give. The feeling of stability Caleb and Everett offered made it tempting to forget that before long, Jayne would need to get his life back on track and set out into the world on his own. The carefree life he lived now wouldn’t be the one he’d live forever.
He had to be careful.
The cabin doors opened. Jayne stepped inside, jabbed the button to the eleventh floor, and waited for the doors to close. If Caleb and Everett would keep him for a few more months, Jayne would have a couple paychecks and an answer from his insurance company on his side. Without rent and utilities to pay, he’d be able to set enough aside to move himself, Shep, and Parker into a small, hopefully more affordable apartment and use their insurance claim to recover the furniture they’d lost. From there, with prudent money management, there was a chance that Jayne could build himself a safety net.
Because of Caleb and Everett, not everything was lost.
The elevator doors closed, and Jayne saw his reflection in their polished chrome finish. His cheeks had gone pink. Over the course of the last week, Caleb and Everett had been supportive without being pushy—they’d offered Jayne help whenever they could, and they’d never demanded anything from him in return. At this point, Jayne had started to wonder if the conversation they’d had where they’d expressed their interest in him was a dream. Apart from fun, flirtatious banter and some light, nonsexual touching, neither one of them had made a move.
Jayne hadn’t ever had a lover so patient, let alone two.
By the time the doors opened again, Jayne was smiling, and he wore that smile all the way down the hall to Caleb and Everett’s front door. On Jayne’s way out, Everett had mentioned that he’d leave the door unlocked so Jayne could come back in without knocking, but Jayne tested the doorknob regardless, half expecting it to catch. It didn’t. The bolt retreated into the cylinder and the door was released from the frame. Jayne opened it and stepped inside, then came to a complete stop.
Caleb and Everett were sitting on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, their legs crossed and their grinning faces looking Jayne’s way. On the table before them was a display that stopped Jayne’s heart. Stunned to silence, he stood on the spot and stared.
The coffee table was overflowing with palettes, compacts, and tubes; bottles, jars, and brushes. Products with rainbow packaging shared table space with their moody, professionally marketed counterparts. In the center of the table, unifying everything, was a cordless double-sided vanity mirror. In it, Jayne saw his reflection.
If his cheeks had been pink before, they were tomato red now.
It was makeup. All of it, makeup. Jayne recognized every brand and knew some of the palettes from their packaging alone. The spread was a makeup artist’s wet dream—the kind of haul that not even a beauty guru could justify. Jayne tried to calculate how much money he was looking at, but his brain fizzled. All he knew was that if Gwynn wanted to know how much a metric fuckton was, he’d find it right there on the coffee table.
“Did we kill him?” Caleb asked Everett.
Everett shook his head. “I see his chest moving, so either he’s still breathing, or we’re about to be attacked by a freshly birthed alien spawn.”
