Page 8 of Constantly Cotton
The first was that Jason Constance was thin and pale and exhausted, and he was still worried about his behavior in Cotton’s bed.
The second was that even thin and pale and exhausted, he wasverymale,veryattractive, andnotthe featureless heroic Ken doll that Cotton had been caring for over the last three days.
The third—and most obvious—was that Jason Constance was gay.
He finished shaking out the sheets and tucked them up under Jason’s arms, aware of the man’s wide brown eyes drinking him in.
“What?” Jason mumbled, probably falling asleep. He’d been really sick. Sick enough that the only thing keeping Lance from dialing for an ambulance had been Henry’s assurance that the minutesomebodyknew where this man was sleeping would be the moment somebody would show up there with a gun. Cotton could forgive him for falling asleep right after saying something that momentous; it had taken the wind out of Cotton’s sails too.
“You think I’m pretty,” Cotton said, hating himself because he sounded a little starstruck. “That’s—I mean, a lot of guys think I’m pretty, but… but you care what I think back.That’samazing.”
Jason yawned again and closed his eyes. “So pretty,” he murmured.
Cotton tucked him in tightly, because the fever wasn’t completely gone and he’d started to shiver during the last part of the bath. And then, while his patient and new occupation fell almost immediately asleep, Cotton leaned over and kissed his forehead. “You’re pretty too,” he said.
It wasn’t his imagination. The deeply etched lines of worry and pain next to Jason’s mouth eased, and his lean lips tilted up into almost a smile.
Sit-Rep
JASON HADattended a lot of situation reports in his time, but never as a patient as naked under the hospital sheets as he was confused on top of them.
His pretty nurse with the amazingly wide sepia-colored eyes and dimples in the corners of his cheeks had brought in extra pillows and now sat cross-legged on the floor, wearing nothing but cargo shorts. Apparently it was full-blown end-of-August outside the apartment, and while Jason struggled with fever and chills in a tiny room with white walls and the occasional poster, two twin beds, and a dresser on a four-foot strip of cheap beige carpet between them, the rest of the residents were setting up extra fans over ice chests in the rest of the apartment to keep the temperature down during the heat.
Jason had met everybody. He was sort of sure he’d met everybody.
His brain had already sorted the people who lived here into their own personnel files, complete with skills and weakness.
Curtis—African American with a square face, penetrating brown eyes, a crisp military haircut, a no-bullshit way of taking his turn nursing, and a stack of textbooks in kinesiology and nursing he was reading in order to get ahead of the local state college start time.
Billy—Latinx with an almost vulpine clean-shaven jaw, brown eyes, and hair long enough to be silky against his collar. He had a sarcastic sense of humor that bordered on bitter, was terrifyingly competent, and detailed every last thing he ate in a diet diary, including carrots.
Randy—translucently white, freckled, red-haired, gangly, clumsy as fuck, easily panicked, and had trouble remembering his indoor voice. Also nearly six-and-a-half-feet tall and seemed to get hurt walking through doors.
Vinnie—Caucasian, tanned, brown hair and hazel eyes, with a shy smile and a habit of deferring to anybody else in the house. Frequently heard asking the other roommates what they were doing outside of Johnnies—whatever that was.
And then there was Cotton.
Cotton—dark haired, sloe-eyed, Caucasian with a faint tan. Taller than Vinnie and Billy, shorter than Randy, he spoke quietly and seemed to be a born caretaker.
All of the boys—men?—allof them were between eighteen and twenty-four, built like they’d been sculpted from marble, and pretty as hell, even Randy, when he wasn’t practically shouting things like “Oh my God, the hair on my balls itches!”
Jason hadn’t had the nerve to ask where exactly he’d been taken to recover, but he was really close to having a heart-to-heart with God and inquiring pointedly to see if the big guy was having him on.
He’d been celibate for ten years and he woke uphere? Wherever here was, if it wasn’t a cosmic joke, it should have been.
Because of course all of the young men—every last one of them—had helped to care for him, change his dressings, change hisbedding, and sponge him down when he was out of his mind with fever. All he’d wanted was a date, maybe. An average-looking guy. Some wine. A chance to talk about something besides his job. That was it. It had been his fantasy for ten years.
But no, he had to wake up in a boarding house for gay male angels. And the guy who seemed to have the most responsibility for him—Cotton—was the prettiest one of all.
But that wasn’t what he was going to say to the people gathered around his bed.
Henry Worrall was five feet eleven inches of solid all-American-boy soldier. Jason wasn’t sure what branch of the military, but he recognized the posture and the haircut and even the way he ground his teeth. There were ways to do that your CO wouldn’t see. Henry knew them all.
He was standing boyfriend-close to Lance, the doctor who had given orders to all the other guys in the house, telling them how to care for Jason. He didn’t remember much from the past three days, but he remembered that: the barked orders and the instant deference to both Henry and Lance.
But Henry and Lance weren’t the ones dominating the room right now, and Cotton, sitting quietly between the dresser and the bed Jason was lying in, was certainly not in charge.
The guy in charge was a little older than everyone else—although still younger than Jason!—with dark blond hair, arresting green eyes, and a face that bore both ancient scars of childhood acne and more recent bruises and scrapes from what looked like a rough couple of days. He was wearing cargo shorts and a bright blue T-shirt with otters on it and stood like he was in pain. Jason didn’t need a sign or a dossier to remember exactly who this was.
