Page 37 of Shades of Henry
“I don’t want to talk about it!” Henry said almost desperately.
“I don’t care!” Lance roared, and Henry was so surprised, he sat flop-bott on the lid of the porcelain throne.
“Okay.” He wrapped his hands around his knees. “What do you want to know?”
Lance scrubbed at his face with his free hand before setting up his bag on the small counter by the sink. Carefully, he took out a little silver tray and set up some stitching equipment and some bandages and ointment on it.
“Let’s start with who hit you?”
Henry grimaced. “That would be the private investigator who came with the lawyer Galen hired.”
Lance paused, frowning. “Isn’t Galen a lawyer?”
Henry let out a breath. “Yes, but as he was so careful to inform me, he’s a corporate attorney. He said I needed a criminal defense attorney, and he’d read up about a guy who took… I don’t know. Underdog cases. So we drive to the offices, and they, like, just moved there. They were still painting when we walked in.”
“They?”
“Well, the actual lawyer guy, Cramer, he’s in the back, doing lawyer stuff, I guess. But he’s got this guy named Rivers, wearing, like, beat-up cargo shorts and no shirt. When he finallydidput on a shirt, it was so ragged, you guys wouldn’t use it to sop up jizz. Anyway, he’s the PI who works for Cramer, and he’s a fuckin’ piece of work.”
Lance snorted and slid his gloves on. “Define ‘fuckin’ piece of work.’”
Henry blew out a breath, trying to describe Jackson Rivers. “Well, I guess he and Cramer are boning—”
Lance pulled back and looked at him. “Are you trying to sound offensive, or are you just pissed off?”
Henry regarded him unhappily. God, trying to explain what happened—the way Rivers had insisted on the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and anyone who didn’t play it his way wasn’t worth his time…. That rankled.
“I just—why’s everybody got to know the big gay secret?” he asked almost tearfully, his conversation with his brother still raw in his soul. “Why does anybody have to know I slept with the guy in the fucking dumpster? Why’s that important? What does that prove to anybody?”
Lance leaned over closely and began to apply ointment to the cut over his eyebrow, then to the one on his cheek.
“It proves you’re human, Henry,” Lance said quietly, his breath fanning Henry’s cheek in a way Henry had hungered for since that strangely intimate night on the couch two weeks ago. Since the other interlude the night before. “What did Rivers think it proved?”
Henry swallowed, remembering their confrontation. The first thing Rivers had done, besides been kind and funny and try to be his friend, was to go talk to Reg about the confrontation two weeks earlier. Reg wasn’t stupid—he’d heard Henry call Scott “Martin Sampson,” and the truth had come out. But not before Henry had stepped on Jackson Rivers’s last nerve.
“He knew I was lying,” Henry said. “And he just kept at it and kept at it, and then I told him but….” God, he sounded like a little kid. “I pissed him off. He’s… I guess he’s got his own issues. He’s got scars all over his body, Lance. I mean, I’ve seen guys scarred up from deployment who didn’t have anything on this guy. So I yelled, and he asked me to let him out of the car, and I got mad because….” God.
“Because…?” Lance put the butterfly bandage over his eyebrow with such tenderness, Henry almost didn’t feel the ping when the edges of the skin were drawn together.
“Because he was like you. Not like you, exactly….” Henry grimaced. He was so tired. That conversation with his brother had been his last straw. He knew all his yearning shone through in his eyes, the way he liked Lance’s almond-shaped eyes, his decisive eyebrows, the kind twist to his full lips. “Not as pretty,” he finished weakly. “Not as… as sweet. But he wanted to be my friend, and I drove him away because apparently I don’t know how to act around nice people. Anyway, he got out of the car, and I lost it, and….” And this was the really humiliating part.
“You decked him?” Lance asked, horrified.
“I’m so stupid.” Henry wanted to bury his face in his hands.
“Oh my God. You hit your lawyer.” Lance’s eyes were as round as his mouth.
“I hit my private investigator!” Henry protested. And then, glumly, because apparently he’d already proven his maturity level hadn’t improved much since he’d gone cow-tipping on a cold November, he said, “But my lawyer knows about the fight. After we… finished fighting and did the bro-bullshit-make-up thing, we went to look at Martin Sampson’s body, and Cramer was waiting at the hospital with Dr. Tagliare.” Henry sighed. “It was obvious Rivers had wiped the floor with me. God. Everybody knows I had a one-nighter with the dead guy, and nowyouknow I got my ass kicked by a guy I outweigh by about thirty pounds.Ishould have been the one in the dumpster and saved everybody the fucking trouble.”
Lance flicked him on the forehead, which was probably the one spot on his face not injured. “Shut up,” he said thickly. “You have no idea how worried I was about you.”
Henry swallowed against his need to grab Lance and never let him go. “I’m sorry I worried you,” he said softly. “I… it’s been sort of a fucking day.”
They stared at each other for a fraught moment before Lance turned his attention to Henry’s battered body again.
“You have gravel in your shoulder!” Lance exclaimed. “I thought you said you’d been treated!”
“Tagliare cleaned me up enough and gave me some hospital scrubs so I could look at the corpse,” Henry said, exhausted. “I don’t think he saw the shoulder thing—it was covered by the scrubs.”
