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Bo shut the door of his truck with a soft thud, gathered a reused grocery plastic bag of samples for Eli, and tiptoed to the front door. The sun that hovered a handspan above the horizon warmed his back, its golden glow reflecting off the undulating, old glass panes he didn’t have the money to replace yet.
The scuff of his thick-soled construction boots was loud in the sleepy afternoon as trudged up the front path. Spent crocuses were replaced by vibrant, yellow daffodils with delicate orange centers and, if he imagined hard enough, he detected a scent of pollen in the air.
Tired. He was just tired. His belly twisted with a painful pang, and Bo realized he was starving.
The façade of peeling paint and unfinished renovations reflected his inner state. Worn, disjointed, but still not quite ready to fall apart, he tiptoed across the wood plank porch, past the empty swing that hung lonely off its rusting chains, and tried the door.
Unlocked.
The creepy feeling he’d felt down by the furnace burners washed over him again. Tight throat and nauseous stomach were accompanied by a sense of foreboding. Eli should keep the door locked. It meant having to hobble on crutches, sure, but that was a small price to pay for his safety.
The door creaked as Bo slowly pushed it into the small tiled foyer, and softly shut it behind him.
“Eli? I’m home!”
The house was silent, devoid of the expected clicking on the keyboard and the cooking smells of attempted dinner.
“Eli?” Bo’s call was now a shout of alarm. He dashed to the right and peeked into the kitchen. The left, across the hallway and into the living room.
The brown sofa was centered in the middle, the way Bo liked it, and the coffee table was tidy and free of dirty dishes and Eli’s sundry papers.
Sleeping. He must’ve been sleeping. Chastised, Bo tiptoed to the almost-shut pocket doors to the music room.
He peeked in.
The bed was made, a pile of Eli’s clothing was heaped next to it. No Eli.
“Eli?!” Bo yelled, thundering up the stairs to the second floor, where Eli might have crawled for a change of scenery. Or an ill-advised shower.
If he crawled up the stairs, maybe he got stuck and couldn’t get back down. Images of disaster flashed through Bo’s mind. No, not again. No more blood and hospitals and stitches. No more... no Eli up there, either.
“Honey? You here?” Bo’s strong voice carried the way a scared man will bellow to hide his fear.
He heard a flush from downstairs, then water running. The small bathroom door opened, and the familiar click-and-drag of crutches and one good leg told him Eli was alive, well, and downstairs.
He thundered down the staircase, rounding into the hallway. Fear gave to frustration as Bo felt anger well up in his chest. Scared for no good reason... a few long-legged strides took him to the open pocket doors, where Eli was setting his crutches aside as he prepared to sit down at his open laptop.
Big, black earphones were covering his ears and a tell-tale electrical cord hung down his chest and toward his jeans’ pocket.
Bo sagged with relief. “Eli!”
Eli turned, yelped with surprise, and almost fell backward. He took his earphones off. “Shit, Bo! Warn a guy, will you?”
Bo frowned. “Can you hear anything with those things on? I thought the aliens got you. I looked everywhere, yelling and running around like an idiot!”
“Sorry.” Eli didn’t sound sorry at all. “I just wanted my music. You don’t have a docking station.”
The sick feeling of threat now blended with outright irritation. “You should at least lock the door, if you can’t hear!”
Bo stalked off to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator hard enough to threaten its hinges. They’d either scrounge, or order a pizza. Although... “Hey, what’s all this stuff?”
“Mom,” Eli called out cheerfully. “She left today. She thinks she was in our way, but she ran out and got a bunch of groceries.” Bo thought Eli was done talking, but the tap-tap-tap of fingers on the keyboard didn’t split the silence. “Um, Bo, I have to ask you this thing.”
Bo stuck his head out of the kitchen. “What?”
“The tulips.”
The fucking tulips. What had he been thinking, bringing flowers for Eli? So dumb. Guys didn’t go for this sort of shit. Eli would just make fun of him and it would be middle school all over again, and...
“I wanted to thank you. They’re so pretty. But Mom couldn’t find a vase.”
Eli was thanking him for flowers. Bo stood in the kitchen entrance, leaning his shoulder into its milled wood trim. “Yeah?” he croaked.
“Mom says a gay guy would have a vase around.” He fluttered his long, brown eyelashes at him, and as Bo locked his gaze with Eli, he realized he wasn’t the only scared guy in the room. “So, anyway... you have any vases around?”
And then it all made sense in that sort of stupid, round-about way. Eli, sitting on his pillow yet not touching the work that had fascinated him yesterday. Eli, out of sorts and insecure, wondering whether Bo had any vases, because a guy having a flower vase was apparently as good as waving a rainbow flag in a Pride parade. Which was dumb. Bo was sure straight guys had vases, too.
He slumped against the wood-trimmed edge of the kitchen opening. His shoulders tightened in an effort to pull himself together just as his knees threatened to give way. Bo didn’t want to crash to the floor. He grabbed the kitchen counter behind him for support. “You... you’re asking if I’m gay?”
Eli didn’t make a sound. He just swallowed, then nodded.
“Well hell, Eli, I play in a gay club, I can’t wait to do unspeakable things to you, and I have a whole collection of vases.”
“Unspeakable things?” Eli’s voice wavered, thin and dry and full of longing.
“Totally unspeakable. And those tulips are for you, but I never gave them to you. The timing...”
“Sorry,” Eli said. “Sorry I’ve been so out of touch. I just – “ he swallowed again, and ran his hands up his face. “It’s just work. I didn’t mean to push you aside.”
Bo drew a breath as he fought to retain his feet under him. He pushed away from the door jamb, pulled the bunch of yellow tulips out of the spare drinking glass and made his way to Eli. “Here, I got you tulips. To cheer you up. Except the stems are all mushy now.”
Eli grabbed the drooping bunch of stems, set them on the table, and turned to Bo. “Thank you,” he said. He then reached for Bo’s neck and pulled him in for a dry, chaste kiss. “They’re the best tulips ever.”
DINNER WAS a haze of reheated supermarket health food that had probably cost way too much. The tulips now sat in a small crystal vase and their stems were cut so they would last. Eli had moved his laptop, and he and Bo had stacked the boxes and documents into tidy piles along the wall. They had the dining room table back.
“How was your day?”
Bo jerked his head up as though the question surprised him. “”Uh...” He grinned. “Shitty in a hung-over kind of way, but it got better later.” He poked into the fancy ravioli Eli’s mom insisted they would both love. “What’s in this stuff? It tastes like crap.”
“Wild mushrooms. Or lobster. I can’t tell which one is which.” Eli crinkled his nose. “Mom got those. She meant well. Personally, there’s nothing better than plain ricotta cheese in those.”
“Word,” Bo said, but he dutifully chewed and swallowed the food before him.
“Feeling too guilty to waste it,” Eli said morosely as he chased the uninspiring squares around his plate. “If we had a dog, we could give it to the dog and order a pizza.”
“You ever had a dog?” Bo chewed another ravioli, fast, and chased it with a gulp of beer.
“Yeah. She was a mutt my uncle left with us before he moved to England. She died when I was in college. She was awesome, though.” Eli’s nose tickled as he thought of Ivy and focused on finding the funniest memory he could remember. After all the drama he put Bo through, it wouldn’t do to cry over a dog that’s been gone for years. “Mom used to hang Christmas cookies on the tree when we got her,” he said fondly. “And Ivy, she was part lab. Brown. She couldn’t ever say no to food.”
Bo chuckled. “Sounds adventurous. What happened? Did she knock the tree over?”
“No.” Eli pushed the awful ravioli away. “She learned to stand on her hind legs, and she’d crane her neck like this,” Eli craned his neck and tilted his jaw, demonstrating, “so that she could delicately chew the cookie in place. She left the slimy ribbons on the branches. It was amazing. Gross, too.”
Bo took another sip of beer, then pushed it away, got up, and brought a bottle of blue Gatorade out of the refrigerator. “That sounds like fun. Maybe someday we can get a dog.”
Eli watched him drink straight out of the bottle, then freeze, and slide his eyes toward Eli. Their gazes met.
Bo probably hadn’t even realized he was making anything resembling a long-term plan. He sat very still, with just a bit of a twitch under his eye and his plastic bottle raised halfway up. He lowered it slowly. “Let me do the dishes,” he said gruffly, reached for Eli’s plate, and didn’t comment on the wasted food.
“Thank you,” Eli said. For taking the dishes, sure, but also for the feeling of the warmth of home that Bo seemed to have shared so freely. Eli hadn’t felt so welcome in quite a long time.
As Bo got started on the dishes, Eli stood up and put a bit more weight on his left foot. The wound stretched, but he didn’t feel the telltale pulling that had bothered him only two days ago. He didn’t even need any meds today.
“You’ll want to catch up on your sleep today, won’t you,” Eli said as he followed Bo into the kitchen, leaning on his crutches as little as possible.
“I better,” Bo said over the running water. Weird food smells were chased out by the clean and familiar lemon-scented dish soap. He set the last dishes in the dishwasher as Eli watched. This was a good time to observe Bo. The way he moved in the kitchen was different from the expansive power he showed by the furnace. Here, he was gentle. Subtle. Almost delicate.
Eli cleared his throat. “I should catch up on my sleep, too.”
Bo turned the water off. “I can stay down here, if you want,” he said. His offer was quiet, almost shy with hesitation. Eli wondered why. Bo was fantastic. He could have whomever he desired.
“My leg’s feeling good,” Eli said. “And a shower would be nice.”
“No.” Bo turned toward him and all his hesitation was gone. “No stairs. You know what the nurse said!”
“I’ll be careful. Although if you think I’d disturb your beauty sleep – “ Some guys didn’t stay over, others preferred to sleep alone. Sleeping with Bo would’ve been intimate, which is precisely why Eli was craving it. He knew it was a bad idea, bouncing back from Jeff and Matt like that, on a rebound and probably rushing toward a disaster. Or he would’ve been, if Bo had been some other guy. A less stable, less stubborn guy.
Bo dried his hands on a dish towel and hung it on a bar mounted inside the cabinet door under the sink. “Come on. I’ll carry you.”
BO COULD hardly believe he’d said that. He meant it, though. Having Eli upstairs, in that huge king-size bed, would be almost unimaginably nice. “I’ll get your PJ’s,” he said, ready to head toward the music room.
“No PJ’s.” Eli’s pupils were dilated. “Just my toothbrush and razorblade, if you please.”
There was no way this could’ve been happening. Bo knew he was headed for a heartbreak of a lifetime. This guy, he was staff. A white shirt. Nice, considerate, sexy as all get-out, but... staff. Old hurt threatened to pull him back and cloud the happiness he felt with an old, bitter taste of defeat.
“You sure?” Because Bo wasn’t sure himself.
“Either you carry me or I’ll crawl to your bed myself.” Eli’s posture had changed. He looked taller and broader, and way more sinuous than before. He looked as though his injury was long gone and he didn’t have a care in the world. Bo knew better, though. Eli wouldn’t pull his stitches out – not on his watch.
He closed the span between them, dug his shoulder into Eli’s belly, grabbed his knees, and stood. “Drape yourself over me,” he said. “The ceiling’s not as tall going up the stairs.”
Warmth covered Bo’s back. Eli grabbed him around the waist from behind, pressing his face into his back and exhaling into his shirt.