Page 51 of Shades of Henry
Henry stopped him right there. “Lance, what exactly was I doing before I showed up here—you remember that?”
Lance closed his eyes. “But—”
“And you may not have seen me naked last night but—”
“Scars,” Lance said. “I’ve seen them—along your hip, your shoulder. Looks like road rash?”
“I got thrown by a blast. A ground missile hit the building behind me, left me concussed and skinned like a fish. But I wasn’t the worst case there. I got up, dusted myself off, and pulled people to safety.” He shrugged, uncomfortable. Just doing his fucking job, right? “I mean… in a perfect world, we would have met when I was, I don’t know, retired military. All comfortable with myself and shit. And you’d have your own practice. And we would have been all mature and whatever. But we didn’t meet then. You met me when I should have been doing something active and promising and yeah, a little bit dangerous.”
Lance rolled his eyes. “You were in awar zone,Henry.”
Henry met his eyes. “And now I’m in an apartment with porn models, repairing corroded plumbing. We all make adjustments, Galahad.”
Lance shifted his hips. “We… we really can’t use that name a lot. You understand that, right? I… I even went by Lance in grad school.”
Henry stared at him. “Didn’t that… didn’t that sort of… I dunno. Negate the use of the name as a porn name?”
Lance stared back. “Well, uh….”
“I mean, wasn’t that a thing with Reg? He didn’t decide to go by a porn name until it was too late, and then he couldn’t answer to it, so he went back to Reg? You want a name people can’t look up on the internet, right?”
Lance turned away and looked studiously at his meal, shoving a huge bite into his mouth. “Tathe gway, ’rrnry!”
“You big coward. Aren’t you adoctor,and youliterallymade your porn name your real name?”
Lance swallowed with a gulp and hid his eyes with his hand. “Did we not just cover that not everybody has their shit together in this business?”
Henry chuckled. “All done eating the big scary food?”
“Fuck you.”
“Good. Now look at me. We’re getting back to the hard thing.” He waited until Lance had dropped his hand so Henry could take it in his own. “Can you deal with the PI thing? It’s looking a lot less dangerous than the ‘deployed in a war zone’ thing, but not nearly as sexy.”
Lance’s mouth quirked up at the sides and he nodded. “I—you look really happy for a guy about to be arrested. I would like to see you be happy when, you know, there’s nothing hanging over your head.”
Henry kissed Lance’s knuckles a little. “Wow. I’m a novice here. Is this what a relationship is like?”
“Sure,” Lance said, obviously surprised. “This….” He frowned. “This is actually better than my last relationship was.”
“Well, you don’t need to sound so shocked,” Henry muttered. “I mean, it wasn’t functional or public, but Mal and I managed to keep a major secret for eleven years. We had to havesomeskills.”
Lance was suddenly sober, and he searched Henry’s eyes with his own. “Do you think about it like that?” he asked. “Like a relationship?”
Henry stood up suddenly, moving to put the leftover veggie simmer into a reusable Ziploc bag. He’d originally looked for butter-ware or leftover sour cream containers, but it turned out, nobody in this house ate anything with that much fat in it.
Ever.
He made himself busy in the kitchen in silence, knowing Lance was watching him through troubled eyes.
“No,” he said at last. “I… I thought it was. I… I mean, we were together, right? There was this one time—right after we got through basic training, hand-to-hand and weapons combat—where we went on leave and Mal dragged me to this cheap hotel that…. God. I went and bought sheets for it, because we were going to be there a week but we couldn’t afford anything better.” He felt a grimace pass over his features. “Mal and Debbie were saving up for off-base housing.”
Lance made a… well, not a sound, exactly. More like a breath. A long, slow breath out from his nose.
“Anyway,” Henry continued, not sure what to do with that… breath, “we’d gotten the hard bang out of our system, and I said, ‘Hey, why don’t we go out to the bar and get some drinks or something,’ and he said we weren’t leaving the hotel room. And I sort of laughed him off. I showered and got dressed and was about to leave when he….” Henry’s hands started to shake. He wasn’t sure where this memory had come from or why it had chosen tonight to slip out. It was a long time ago, right? It’s not like Malachi had meant it.
Right?
“What’d he do?” Lance asked, and Henry glanced up to see his eyes tracking Henry’s movements as he played Captain Domesticity in a way that would have made his father sneer. Well, his father never had to care for a bunch of broke students/porn models who needed to save everything from half sandwiches to grilled chicken breasts if they wanted to have enough food to eat all month. And then, apparently, to throw it up.
