“Everybody gets fixed,” Theo said firmly. “I hear you. Remember—we inherited this cat.”
“Inherited?” Spencer snorted. “Inherited? Are you shitting me? Would you like to hear how we got this cat, Preston?”
Preston’s eyes went wide. “All I know is that Theo had it with him when he got to the hospital that night!”
“Yeah, well, given he jumped out of a perfectly functioning flotation device into a valley full of water to get the damned cat, I’m glad he kept holding on to her,” Spencer said sourly.
“I was trying to get her with the pole,” Theo told him, laughing.
“Which you dropped into the water!” Spencer returned.
“How did you get him out?” Preston asked.
Spencer grimaced. “We had two barge poles. One of them was being used as a stay to keep the garden hose from unraveling—we were using the hose to keep us tied to a tree. I grabbed that one to get him out, and it worked, but….”
“But by the time I was out of the drink, with the cat, the raft was floating toward the canyon,” Theo told him. “And that’s when the helicopter got there.”
Preston nodded. “That’s a good story,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s a miracle story. It’s like when Damien came to get me and Glen and Cash, flying a broken helicopter. Or when Cash dangled out of a helicopter to save Glen.”
Theo grinned. “Or when the snowboarder and the accountant rode the airplane wing down a mountain to save Damien!”
Preston nodded again. “All these miracle stories,” he said. “And the cat having kittens or the baby you’re holding feel like bigger miracles. Why is that?”
Spencer’s breath caught, and he looked at Theo with his entire chest on fire. “I don’t know,” he said. “Life’s funny that way.”
At that moment, Belinda got there and set the casserole on the table, along with a big bowl with salad fixings.
“I was going to stay and eat with you,” she said smiling, “but Oscar surprised me by putting another casserole in. He said it’s your favorite, Preston, so you two come down when you’re done with chores.”
She made one more run into the back bedroom to look at the kittens, and then came and gently lifted the sleeping baby into her arms, where he crashed against her shoulder in absolute oblivion.
They walked out into the twilight shadows, leaving Theo and Spencer in a suddenly quiet house.
“You want me to get a plate?” Theo asked, smiling.
Spencer shook his head. “We can sit at the table,” he said. “Leave the door open and the screen shut. Open the windows. It’s a little chilly out, but it’s still nice.”
“Almost romantic,” Theo said lightly, standing up to start setting the table.
Spencer shoved out of the recliner and sighed. “I’ll work on full romantic one day, if you like,” he promised rashly.
Theo’s smile went incandescent. “You just did,” he said. “Go check on the cat and come sit down.”
Spencer did as ordered and hobbled down the hall. Sure enough, in the last light through the window, Stupid was licking what was probably her final kitten while the others mewled and nursed. Colonel surrounded the content little family with his long Shepherd body, panting proudly, as though he’d done any part of what had recently gone down, but Spencer wasn’t going to pop his bubble.
Idiot dog was happy with an idiot cat and idiot adorable kittens. It didn’t make no goddamned sense, but it appeared to be the truth.
“I hear you,” he muttered and turned back toward the front room.
Chicken casserole was one of his favorites too—or maybe he simply liked Belinda’s comfort food as a whole—so dinner was enjoyable, and the smell of the cool evening on the cut grass of the ranch with the pink light of twilight made his belly tingle with the anticipation of spring.
He and Theo talked easily—but then that had never been their problem, not from the first moment Theo had pulled him gasping out of the drink, had it?
They had both pushed their plates back, and the silence had just begun to be heard when Spencer’s mouth opened and he began to speak.
“My parents seemed perfect,” he said, “when I was a kid. I figured everybody got their ass beat in small towns in Bumfuck when they didn’t do their chores. Moms always backed their husbands against their kids. And it was okey-dokey to sit and pray for the deaths of everybody who wasn’t us when we sat down to dinner.” He heard the words then—his father’s words—and thought about how easy it was to buy into hate words when you didn’t know any better. “And then Dad caught me kissing my first boy, and I realized that I was one of the people my family hated. And for about a minute I thought about changing who I was to be who my parents wanted me to be, and then it hit me. I don’t understand why the rest of the world doesn’t figure it out, but it hit me, right there at the dinner table with a swollen face and sore ribs, that when you have a list of people you hate, eventually you’ll get around to someone you love. And I realized that I couldn’t live with a list like that on my soul. And my parents would ask me, every day, if I’d asked God to not be a—” He stopped. He couldn’t use that word here, not with Theo. He couldn’t use any of the hate words anymore. “Not be gay anymore, and I said I asked God to not be his son instead. That was my last beating, because I hit back that time, and after that… just chores and meals, and I left the table and did the dishes and went to bed. No picnics with the family. No church. I got my ROTC scholarship and slept on people’s couches until I went away to college.”
“Oh, Spence—”
He held up a hand. “See, but I had hope then. I thought, hey, there’s people out there who aren’t my father. And then I met a guy—saw him around, we hooked up a couple of times, and then we texted, and suddenly I thought, ‘Wait, is this a boyfriend?’ and we saw each other at the canteen at a base Elsie and I hadn’t been to before, and there we were, chatting each other up, when I realized Elsie had disappeared and four guys who’d been giving her shit had disappeared too. I remember looking at the guy and saying, ‘Hey, where’s my flight partner?’ and he gets this look, really annoyed, and goes, ‘Oh, those guys. They’re always messing around.’ And I stood up to go get her, and he was like, ‘Hey, there’s nothing we can do. Do you want to come to my bunk?’ And… and for a moment, I was tempted, right? Because this was a boyfriend—or the closest thing I’d ever had to one. But I couldn’t leave Elsie when I didn’t know if she was all right.” He grunted. “You know the rest.”
“She wasn’t all right,” Theo said softly. “And you weren’t either.”
Spencer gazed out the door into the purpling night. It was officially chilly outside, and he thought about closing everything down.
In a minute, he thought. This needed saying.
“So that happened, and then civilian life was the two of us running into one clusterfuck after another, and… and I found I couldn’t trust any guy I was with, really. What if they all turned out to be douchebags? What if I really liked a guy and he turned out to be awful? Like my old man. Like those fuckers who went after Elsie. Or even just… flawed. Like the guy who would sit back and let bad shit happen on his watch because it wasn’t him. So it was easier, you know? To do a guy once and make him breakfast and send him on his way. Wasn’t great—obviously. Preston set this place up for me, and I moved out here and didn’t get laid for over a year, and I was fine with that. Preferred my dog. Elsie didn’t let me down. Glen and Damien and Preston didn’t. Oscar and Belinda are perfect people. Who needed someone in his life who would care for him and take care of him when he was alone and remind him to be his better self?”