In Another Country Page 5

  “Perhaps. But, usually, shy. And people tell me I’m overly formal. Standoffish, even. I’ve heard ‘humorless.’”

  “Aw, hell no,” Dec said. “You’re a riot. In a weird way, but a riot.”

  Tupper ducked his head and—Jesus, was he blushing?

  What the hell. Tupper was obviously pretty happy with Dec’s bedroom skills, and good god if Dec was by some quirk of the universe attracting this guy who was so, so out of his league, he sure wasn’t gonna waste it. So once the waitress had given them one last coffee refill, Dec sat up straight, looked down at his hands while he pointlessly wiped them with a napkin that was already stickier than his hands were, and said, “Hey. So I think we should spend every possible second in bed until you have to leave.”

  Over the next couple of weeks that “spending every second in bed” plan turned out to be completely great. Dec was getting laid so regularly that he was actually less twitchy—sometimes at work he found himself just kind of sprawled in his desk chair when he was thinking, instead of tapping a pencil or bouncing his leg like usual. Ceci even asked him what was up with all the calm. And yeah, Dec could probably have trusted her with what was going on, but hey. It was gonna have to wrap up in the next couple of weeks anyway, so no point, right? “Just been working on my zen,” he told her, and she said, “Uh-HUH.”

  And “in bed” didn’t always mean fucking or asleep. Sometimes they’d lie there after coming for a long, long time. If they’d had arms around each other it would have been cuddling, which was a relationshippy place that Dec wasn’t gonna go, so he just slung a leg over Tupper, which totally didn’t count. Sometimes Tupp tried to wrap an arm around and Dec would twitch away and mutter something about the heat.

  And sometimes they’d just...talk. Funny cop stories, horrible cop stories, funny horrible cop stories. One lazy morning after a couple weeks of this, Dec surprised himself by blurting out, “So, what do you miss from home?” And then winced, because, way to remind both of them that this had an expiration date.

  But Tupper smiled, like he’d been waiting to be asked, and said, “Real dark, dark you can see stars in. Real quiet. My family—even though they all live in another province and I don’t see them often anyway, I miss them more somehow with a national border between us. My cats.”

  And Dec just blinked for a while there, because of course Tupper wasn’t some magic creature made entirely of cop stories and orgasms, of course he was an actual person with a life and, apparently, multiple cats. Dec had told Tupper all kinds of things about his own life already, but somehow, like an asshole, he’d just thought of Tupper as...what he had of Tupper, right now, which was probably a really tiny bit of what there was.

  So, to make up for it, Dec said, “Cats?” and Tupper beamed and said, “They love the catsitter, but when I get home they’ll pretend they were miserable,” and next thing Dec knew he had grabbed his wallet out of his pants draped over the bedroom chair that was there to have stuff draped over it, and was showing Dec multiple pictures of what were apparently two different black cats, although they looked exactly the same to Dec. “Piano and Forte,” Tupper said proudly, and Dec was for the first time ever happy that he’d spent a couple complaining years as a kid taking parent-mandated piano lessons. Because when he said, “One’s soft and one’s loud?” Tupper actually shoulder-punched him in glee. Tupper usually wasn’t a shoulder-punching type of dude.

  And yeah, sometimes they actually made it out of bed. Because Tupper was probably never coming back to Fayetteville—why would he, right? So Dec had, like, a host obligation to show him the place.

  They went to the dollar theater for a shoot-em-up. They ate Chinese food at Orient Express, which Dec had loved since he was a kid because it was so goofy how the restaurant tried to pretend you were on the Orient Express—they seated you in booths with curtains and played a background tape of train noises. He told Tupper how he’d demanded his parents take him there for every birthday as a kid, until he got too cool for it at fifteen or so. The cool wore off again at about twenty.

  Tupper, of course, had requested camping trips every birthday.

  “How the hell is that a treat?” Dec said, awkwardly dunking a wonton in soy sauce and trying, unsuccessfully, not to get turned on by how graceful Tupp was with his chopsticks. “You get eaten by mosquitoes and chiggers and, I don’t know, ice bison.”

  Tupp slurped up some noodles—Dec did not understand how anyone could slurp gracefully, but he did—and said, “Ice bison, while terrifying, are largely vegetarian,” so Dec had to shut him up with a quick grope under the table. It was a good thing the booths were curtained.

  After Tupp gave him a few gentle ankle kicks Dec stopped groping, and Tupp said, “I loved camping. That’s where I decided I wanted to have an outdoorsy job when I grew up.” And he went on talking about learning tracking skills from his mom and campfire building from his dad and never once beating his sister in hatchet-throwing competitions.

  Dec just listened and watched Tupper glow about things that would have bored the shit out of Dec, but somehow hearing about Tupp enjoying them was ...way less boring.

  They spent a whole afternoon in Edward McKay’s, a weirdass used bookstore with the cheapest decorating scheme on the planet—it was in a metal Quonset hut, the shelves were stacked wooden wine boxes, and the entire carpet was a million different colors of one-square-foot carpet samples.

  What they didn’t spend on decorating they spent on stock, though. Dec picked up a couple more paperbacks for his growing Doc Savage collection, and Tupper poked through non-fiction forever and then very excitedly showed Dec a faded dusty book called “Extremely Boring Birds of the Arctic.”

  Well, okay, called something like that, and seeing Tupper just beaming over something so fucking tedious made Dec... happy, and also gave him this weird urge to hug Tupper right there in the middle of the bookstore, so Dec shut that right down and gave Tupper a very manly shoulder punch instead and said, “Whatever floats your boat, big guy.”

  Once they even headed out to one of Dec’s junior-high haunts. That happened because they were lying in bed after trading off that...intercrural thing. (Dec had gotten very fond of this new vocabulary word. Murmured it to himself under his breath at work sometimes.) So Dec was sweaty and sticky and pleased with life and not quite to that stage where he had to have a sandwich, and sometimes when he was in that sweet spot he just rambled. And for some reason during this particular ramble he found himself telling Tupper about the sign and the roller rink.

  Dec used to go to the roller rink all the time in junior high—he hung out with four or five guys from his neighborhood, and one of their parents would give them a ride there most weekends and pick them up a few hours later. It was only two bucks entry so his dad didn’t even bitch about giving him the admission price.

  “I actually got pretty good at it,” he said. “I could skate backwards. They set up races once a night and sometimes I even won my age group. You ever try it?” he asked Tupper, who shook his head.

  “There wasn’t a rink anywhere around when I was growing up,” Tupper said. “I ice skated relentlessly, though. Hours of pond hockey.”

  “Bet your pond didn’t have a disco ball.”

  “No, Dec, it was sadly underequipped, I see that now.”

  Dec snorted and stretched, groaning a little. Lately it felt like a lot of his tense spots were...unclenching, and then he’d remember Tupper was leaving soon and they’d knot right back up again. But right now he was still all sex-drugged and relaxed.

  “So anyway, they had a disco ball, and a couple of times a night they’d cut the lights down and just have spotlights bouncing off the ball and a mushy song playing and it would be “couples skate,” and there was a sign that said, “A COUPLE IS A BOY AND A GIRL OR TWO GIRLS.”

  He laughed a little but Tupper didn’t, and instead got a serious forehead wrinkle going. “I don’t understand, I... They were okay with lesbians but…?”

  �
�Nah, I don’t think it occurred to them that two girls holding hands might actually be a real couple,” Dec said.

  “Did it bother you?”

  “What?”

  “The sign?”

  “Nah,” Dec said. “Just thought it was funny.”

  “But you remembered it all this time.”

  Dec shrugged and got out of bed to make sandwiches.

  * * * *

  When they went to the rink he was pleased to find that most of his skills came right back. Tupper learned the basics quickly—a lot of his ice-skating skills transferred—but Dec was able to skate literal circles around him, which hell yes he enjoyed rubbing in a little.

  The sign wasn’t there anymore. But when couples skate was announced Dec quickly got off the floor and Tupp followed without even saying anything. They turned their skates back in and played pinball for a while. Dec was barely looking at the circling twelve-year-olds who got to hold hands, it was totally fine.

  So life within the confines of the bedroom was great, what passed for tourism in Fayetteville was fun, but the Hotshots case was a little frustrating. They’d only had a chance to go back and case the place twice more, with no results—caseloads were getting rearranged to cover a couple guys’ summer vacations, and unsolved murders took precedence over robberies, even robberies with a side of beatdown. Rollie made some noises about dropping the case altogether because who cared what happened to the fags, and Dec was glad to hear through Carter’s office wall Carter shutting him down completely with, “We’re sworn to protect ALL citizens, asswipe.”

  At least Dec had gotten used to taking calls from Tupper at work; he could mostly keep from going completely pornbrain about it now. But he still got a little distracted, because he was a human with a human man-brain talking to someone he’d like to be fucking, which was maybe why no alarms went off when Tupper called and said they should meet over by Hope Mills Lake before heading to the club. And when Tupper said he’d bring food Dec stupidly assumed he meant, like, picking up some sandwiches from Subway.

  Dec got to the parking lot all ready to bolt down a sandwich and then head out, but he didn’t see Tupper at any of the benches near the lot.

  He wandered into the park a little, into a shady part ringed around with trees—and there Tupper was, but he was sitting on the ground. Well, actually on a stripy blanket.

  Dec’s stomach got kind of cold and he didn’t know why. He sat down next to Tupper, who was beaming at him, and he ran his fingers over the blanket and looked down at his fingers and the blanket and all he could think to say was “Blanket.”

  “Why, yes,” Tupper said, and went into some longwinded explanation involving Hudson Bay and First Nations and beaver pelts, which, Dec had no fucking clue.

  Then Tupper started pulling food out of a basket. The food was in a basket, not a plastic Subway bag, and somehow that made Dec’s stomach feel even colder and weirder.

  There was a lot of it, all fancy stuff that had to be from the gourmet section of Kroger. It was all delicious, and Tupper had clearly spent a lot of money on it, and Dec just kept feeling weirder and more sort of—the kind of detached and floaty and very very calm that he’d learned meant he was actually freaking the fuck out. (He spent a lot of time in that zone right after Christine told him it was over.) And he still had no idea why. It was just a fucking picnic.

  Dec stopped in the middle of a bite of (really delicious) banana pudding. He just blinked at Tupper for a couple of seconds, and then remembered to swallow the bite, which had stopped tasting like anything at all, and then managed to say, “Tupp. It’s a picnic.”

  “Well. Yes,” Tupper said. He was giving Dec this “I am concerned for your mental health” look, like Dec had just really intently announced, “Tupp. We are breathing air.”

  “It’s a picnic on the grass in a really pretty spot with fancy food,” Dec said, and through the detached floatiness he could feel that he was starting to lose the calm, although he still had no fucking idea why.

  “Yes?” Tupper said, and he’d gone from looking concerned to looking kind of guilty and that did it, Dec suddenly got what he was freaking out over.

  “It’s a date,” he said.

  “Yes,” Tupper said, softly. Looking down at the blanket.

  Dec got hit with a surge of panic that had him just sitting there shaking for a minute, shivering like he was freezing, on a Fayetteville summer day that was 94 degrees and a billiontyfuck humidity.

  “Tupper,” he said. “You are leaving in a few days. What is the fucking point of a date?”

  “I thought we were dating,” Tupper said. “We have been repeatedly—”

  “Fucking is not the same as dating and you know it,” Dec said. “And you’re leaving.”

  “I am, yes, but...I have a lot of vacation time saved up. That I could use to...possibly return, and you could...you could come visit.”

  Dec bolted to his feet. He was looking down at Tupper now, and maybe that’s what suddenly made Tupper look sort of small, or maybe it was the expression on Tupper’s face, like he knew what was coming.

  “No,” Dec said. “No, it isn’t...this is not. No.”

  “Ah,” Tupper said, calmly, and started putting stuff back into the basket. Dec had a moment of thinking that they were gonna be fine here, it wasn’t any big deal to Tupper, and then he noticed that Tupper was putting containers back in without lids and all piled haphazardly on top of each other, he didn’t even seem to be noticing the spills. Which if it were Dec would be pretty normal, but Tupper was a tidy, tidy person. Tupper was, clearly, freaking the fuck out too.

  “Jesus, Tupp,” Dec said, and he needed to explain, needed Tupper to see that it wasn’t because Dec didn’t…like him or anything, it was just...that was an impossible idea, a stupid idea. “I’m not—” Dec said desperately, and he didn’t know what to finish that with, what was it that he was not?

  Tupper shot him an eyebrow—The Rock had nothing on Tupper’s eyebrow—and said, “Not what, Dec? Not bi? I could have sworn that we’ve had conversations to the contrary.”

  Dec closed his eyes and breathed for a second. “I am, yes, okay, but it isn’t…it’s true but it’s not my life, it’s not how things are gonna go,” and he was kind of stunned listening to himself because he’d never thought this out, or didn’t know that this was what he thought. What the fuck was his brain up to?

  Tupper just sat there looking up at him, looking gorgeous and pissed off and not saying or doing anything to help Dec out at all. Asshole.

  “Look, I…you’ve been great, I’ve had… I haven’t had this good a time in months, okay? But you’re talking like…a relationship. And I’m not gonna do that. No. I was just. I was so fucked up by Christine ending things. Like, I wasn’t sure I was gonna make it levels of fucked up. Like, there were a couple of nights I went out driving all night because I didn’t want to be alone in the apartment with my service revolver, okay?”

  Tupper went even paler than usual, and Dec felt a little sick. He’d never told anybody that before, not even the department shrink they made him go to for a couple of months.

  “So yeah, I’m not looking to try that relationship thing again, anytime soon. And if I ever did, ever again, it’d be years down the road, and it’d be…with a woman, Tupper, so I didn’t have to hide anything, so I could have a life.”

  “Ah,” Tupper said. They were back to ah, and it was so fucking unfair, for him to be sitting there on that blanket looking perfect and getting away with barely saying anything while Dec tied himself in knots with words, he wasn't even sure he believed what he was saying but he couldn’t stop and the idea of some kind of...long-distance long-lasting thing with Tupper was just terrifying, just...no.

  “And you wouldn’t…come on, Tupper, you’d be a country away all the time looking, looking like you and you can’t, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t meet somebody and leave, come on. And I couldn’t take it, I couldn’t take that again.”

  S
ome tiny part of Dec’s brain that insisted on making sense, goddamnit, was pointing out that he was basically saying “I swear I don’t want what you’re offering AND it would kill me when you took it away,” which was...one of those “The food was so terrible! And such small portions!” things. Dec firmly told that tiny sensible brainpart to fuck off.

  “Well,” Tupper said, and stood up. Gracefully, goddamnit. “Thank you for clarifying things, Dec, and I do sincerely wish you a good life. But I don’t think you’re ever going to let yourself have one.”

  Jesus. Dec just stood there gaping while Tupper finished packing up. And then Tupper turned around, looked him in the eye, and stuck out his hand. They’d been fucking like weasels for a month, talking and laughing and fucking and okay sometimes staying in bed long after the fucking doing something that Dec has to admit could be called cuddling, and now they were gonna shake hands goodbye. Jesus.

  Dec shook Tupper’s hand and returned his brisk manly nod. Because what else could he do?

  Tupper strode off, looking a little ridiculous in his tight jeans and tight tee with a swanky picnic basket swinging from one hand.

  Why would a guy going on a month’s assignment bring a picnic basket, anyway? Fuck, he probably bought the basket especially for this...date.

  For some reason that stupid little detail was the thing that finally cracked all the way through what was left of Dec’s cold shocky calm, and suddenly he was standing by himself in the middle of a park in the sun trying to choke down loud dry sobs.

  A kid nearby throwing a frisbee for a German Shepherd shot him a worried look, and Dec bit back on wanting to yell at the kid to fuck off. He scrubbed a hand over his face, and shook himself a little, and headed back to his car.

  The next few days were...gray.

  Dec managed to keep functioning in a way he didn’t right after Christine. Because...that was after a fifteen-year relationship, after something he thought was gonna be lifelong, was gonna be it. So yeah, that was worse. But he also kept functioning this time because he knew he had to. Carter had cut him a lot of slack last time—ignored the flurry of missed work days, ignored the occasional coming into work hungover, browbeat him into seeing that departmental therapist. But if he pulled that again...he wasn't sure he’d keep his job.