Archive of Our Own

“I feel you should be aware, sir, that I fucking hate country music.”

Nate cocked an eyebrow at the towering man standing before his desk. The towering, blond, muscled, and thoroughly delectable man before his desk. Not that that was important, of course. Ice-blue eyes regarded him impassively, but Nate thought he detected just the tiniest glimmer of humor behind the deadpan delivery.

Nate let the eyebrow be his reply, waiting to see if there was more. Sure enough:

“I thought you should know that before you decided whether to hire me or not,” Colbert explained.

“Well, Mr. Colbert,” Nate said, leaning back in his chair and employing his own not inconsiderable poker face, “I guess that depends on whether your hatred for Walt’s musical stylings extends to letting him get shot.”

Colbert’s gaze didn’t waver a jot, but his eyes sharpened at Nate’s words, seeming to really see him for the first time. After a moment, the corner of Colbert’s mouth twitched infinitesimally, but Nate saw it. Ha, his theory was proved.

“It is my considered opinion, sir, that shooting popular entertainers is generally a punishment far disproportionate to their crimes – even for country music singers.” Colbert grinned, suddenly, and Nate felt his dick twitch so hard in shocked answer to that gorgeous smile that he almost jumped in his seat.

Jesus, get a grip, he thought sternly to himself. He couldn’t understand why the hell this man was having such a visceral effect on him. He was hot as fuck, sure, but there was no shortage of ridiculously hot men in this business. His own client had every country girl in America creaming her panties over his boyish clean-cut aw-shucks looks – and no few of the country boys, either, whether they admitted it or not – but Nate had never responded this way to Walt. Or to anyone, really.

“That’s good to hear,” Nate replied to Colbert’s comment, and Christ he actually sounded a little hoarse. He really needed to actually find time to get laid at some point. “Well, Mr. Colbert, you came very highly recommended by Mike Wynn, so as far as I’m concerned the job’s yours if you think your ears can take it.”

“Brad.”

Nate blinked. “Sorry?”

“If we’re going to work together,” and those damn lips drew up in a crooked half-smile that was somehow even sexier than the grin before it, “you should call me Brad.”

“Brad,” Nate repeated, hoping he didn’t sound as stupid as he felt. “I’m Nate, then. Welcome aboard.”

He smiled as neutrally as he could manage, stood, and held out a hand. He told himself it was just his overheated imagination that Brad’s eyes darted to Nate’s own lips for a bare instant, before reaching over the desk to clasp Nate’s hand. Brad’s palm was warm and dry and interestingly callused, and it was also just Nate’s fucking imagination that the other man held the handshake for just a split second too long.

Nate suddenly realized that as Walt’s bodyguard, Brad was (obviously) going to be in Walt’s company pretty much constantly. And since Walt tended to freeze up and shut down in stressful situations – like, say, the last stretch of recording a new album, like, say, right now – and Nate was perforce obliged to more or less babysit him 24/7 in order to get it done, that meant Brad was also, by extension, going to be in Nate’s company pretty much constantly, too.

Shit.

“Shit!” Walt yelled, tearing off his headphones and hurling them to the floor. For a second Nate thought he might actually jump up and down on them, but he didn’t. Which was good, considering the headphones were worth about a thousand dollars and didn’t even belong to them. If this album went platinum like Nate was determined it would, he was so making Walt buy his own recording studio, because fuck this rental shit.

Assuming they ever finished the album, of course. Which wasn’t looking like a guarantee at the moment.

Nate leaned forward in the control booth and clicked on the speaker to the live room. “Walt, it’s okay. We’ll just do it again.”

“We’ve done it thirty times already!” Walt said despairingly.

Nate sighed. Thirty-three, actually, but who’s counting? At least they’d been able to send the band home.

Next to Nate, the sound engineer snorted, still fiddling with the levels even though it was obvious that they were going to have to take a break. “Dude,” he said, “I thought country boys were supposed to be all laid back and shit, like laying in cornfields and chewing haystalks or whatever. Your boy Walt is cracking my shit up with this L.A. diva hoopla.”

Nate settled for a withering look in answer to this, but Brad interjected a snort of his own from the couch behind them at the rear of the booth. “Ray, considering your trailer-trash, sister-fucking, cow-tipping self hails from the great metropolis of Nevada, Missouri, I believe that would be considered the pot calling the kettle black.”

Ray spun his chair to face Brad, delighted. “Aw, Brad! You read my diary, you sneaky Christ-killer, you! I knew you wanted to find out all my dirty fantasies about your Hebrew Viking ass.”

Brad raised an eyebrow. “You know how to read and write, Ray? Color me amazed.”

Nate considered banging his head against the soundboard, but then Ray would sulk for the rest of the day over the abuse to his precious equipment. Brad and Ray had known each other for less than a month, but had instantly formed one of the oddest friendships Nate had ever seen, constructed of a complex web of insults, mockery, open disdain, and sexual innuendo. There was probably an entire psychological dissertation in examining their unique relationship. Most days Nate found it entertaining, but today was not one of those days.

“Knock it off, both of you,” he ordered. Ray rolled his eyes, and Brad gave Nate a mocking inclination of his head, but both of them shut up. Nate clicked on the speaker again.

“Walt, we’re going to take a break before we go from the top. Let’s eat some lunch, okay?”

Walt looked a little bit like he wanted to cry, but nodded. “Okay.”

Before he could click it off, Ray leaned forward and shouted into Nate’s mike, “It’s okay, Walt buddy, we’ll get this fucker right if I have to hump your head to do it!”

“Shut up, Ray,” Walt, Nate, and Brad said, all at the same time. Ray looked startled a moment, and then started cackling madly. On the other side of the glass, Walt cracked a small grin in spite of himself.

Nate felt a reluctant smile pulling at his own lips, and turned to share it with Brad, only to find Brad staring at him with an intensity that made Nate’s stomach flip. But then the look was gone and Brad was levering himself to his feet with all his usual aloof calm.

“Chow time,” he announced, and nodded to Nate before strolling out of the booth, and Nate was left to wonder, as usual, if he was losing his mind. Brad Colbert was going to be the death of him, he was assured of it.

“Coffee, sir?”

Nate looked up as Brad slid into the chair opposite him, pushing a steaming mug across the table; his jacket gaped for a moment, showing a flash of the underarm gun holster on his left side. On the other side of the breakroom, Walt was staring with his usual mix of amusement and disbelief when it came to Ray, as Ray blathered on merrily about God only knew what, bits of half-chewed sandwich occasionally flying out of his mouth. Nate was just happy Ray was keeping Walt distracted.

“Brad, you know you don’t have to call me ‘sir’, right?”

Brad smiled his crooked half-smile. “Sorry. Old habits.”

Nate knew Brad had been in the Marines before getting into the private security racket – that’s where Mike had met him – but Nate didn’t quite understand why those habits should apply to him in particular. Especially considering his proclivities, which Brad had to have heard about by now.

Nate wasn’t precisely out of the closet, considering the genre of music he worked in, but it was probably one of the worst-kept secrets in Nashville that he was gay. Fortunately, he was also one of the best (read: most lucrative) managers in the business as well, so even his most homophobic colleagues usually found a way to hold their noses about it.

Nate bet Brad wouldn’t be so inclined to call him “sir” if he knew that Nate found it embarrassingly arousing. But then, he found almost everything Brad did to be embarrassingly arousing, so it was probably a wash anyway.

He picked up the mug and sipped. It was perfect, with just the right amount of cream and no sugar, just how Nate liked it. He had no idea when exactly Brad had learned his coffee preferences, but the attention to detail was utterly typical of Brad, who rarely if ever missed anything. It was a trait that was comforting for professional reasons and extremely unnerving for personal ones.

He really had to get over this thing with Brad. Nate couldn’t personally think of a more effective recipe for disaster than falling for a bizarrely charming, frighteningly perceptive, straight ex-Marine who was also your employee – and, not to mention, one who was typically armed with a deadly weapon in your presence. If Brad were to figure out how Nate felt about him, it would be very bad.

Unfortunately, Nate’s heart – and his dick – were violently uninterested in what his brain had to say on the matter, and ergo, Nate was screwed, and not in the good way either. Goddammit.

“Thanks,” he said, indicating the coffee. Brad nodded and leaned back with his own cup, eyes flicking around the room. Nate noted that he had seated himself where he could easily see both Walt and the door to the break room; he was pretty sure that wasn’t a coincidence.

Which reminded him. Nate flipped open the folder in front of him and pulled out the creased paper on top, sliding it across to Brad. “We got another one this morning,” he said.

Brad sat up, almost at attention, and put his coffee down. He picked up the paper and perused the blocky, deliberately scrawling handwriting:

YOU DESGUST ME AND YOU ARE A INSULT TO EVRY THING THIS COUNTRY STANDS FOR. YOU SHOULD BE WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THIS ERTH AND IF NOONE ELSE WILL DO IT I WILL.

“An English major, I see,” Brad said lightly, but his mouth was tight.

“Spelling is not his strong point, no,” Nate agreed.

“Sanity is not his strong point,” Brad countered. “How can Walt be an insult to everything this country stands for? He sings about pickup trucks and rodeos. Now, I find that terribly insulting on a personal level, but even I admit those are perfectly legitimate examples of Americana, God help us all. As far as I can tell, Walt makes the unwashed masses who actually listen to him come in their pants from how American it all is.”

Nate gave him an extremely dry look. “Walt sings about a little bit more than pickup trucks and rodeos, Brad.”

Brad smirked. “Couldn’t prove it by me.”

Nate huffed a breath and abandoned this line of debate as pointless. Given the slightest provocation, Brad would cheerfully spend hours delineating all the myriad abominations of the country music genre, and Nate knew better than to get him started. Once again he wondered why Brad had even taken this job, and once again he wondered why he found Brad’s contempt for Nate’s entire industry to be so inexplicably endearing. Maybe they were both crazy.

Brad’s smirk broadened into a triumphant grin, sensing Nate’s tactical retreat, and Nate gave him yet another dry look in lieu of lunging over the table and kissing the shit out of him, which is what he actually wanted to do and absolutely must not do under any circumstances.

They sat for a while in a comfortable silence, nursing their coffees. When he’d finished his cup, Brad looked again at the note on the table, and slid it back over to Nate, somberly. Nate put it back in the folder. He didn’t bother saying any more about it; there was no point. The police were looking into it, and unless and until they found something on this fucknut, there was nothing to be done but be on the alert and keep Walt working.

Brad looked at Nate, following his train of thought in that uncanny way he had, and nodded. And Nate knew what the nod meant in turn: Nate didn’t need to worry. Brad would be as vigilant as Nate needed him to be. And somehow, Nate thought, the ease with which they worked together was the most attractive thing about Brad of all.

Shit. Time for a larger retreat before he did something he would really regret.

“All right, break’s over,” he announced to the room at large. “We’re going to finish this track today if it’s the last thing I do.”

As it turned out, Walt nailed the vocals on the very next take, and Nate eagerly pushed on to the next track in the hopes of riding the wave. They didn’t quite finish that one, but they had made very satisfying progress by the time Nate gave in to the increasing number of puppy-dog looks from both Walt and Ray and called it a night.

Outside, the sweltering Tennessee air was sticky and still, making Nate feel like he’d stepped into a sauna after the chill blast of the recording studio, which was kept below 70 degrees for the sake of all the electronic equipment. One of these days he was going to end up with pneumonia from the temperature extremes he regularly subjected himself to on this job.

“Sweet dreams, fuckers!” Ray yelled cheerily from the end of the small parking lot. “See you tomorrow!” Nate, Brad, and Walt watched as he climbed into an ancient Pinto that looked like an elephant had tried to trample it, and screeched off into the night.

Brad shook his head. “That man is a special snowflake.”

Walt laughed. “That’s one way to put it.”

Brad smirked, then said, “C’mon, Walt, let’s get you home.” He didn’t actually say it was a bad idea to be standing in the open, but the way he was scanning the parking lot and standing slightly in front of Walt spoke louder than words.

Walt’s mouth pinched together. He still thought Nate was completely overreacting to the note business. He’d been positively rude to Brad when he’d first come on the job (well, as rude as Walt was capable of being, which wasn’t very), resenting the notion of having a bodyguard at all, but by the end of the first week his resentment had transformed into a charmingly obvious case of hero worship. Nate knew Walt had very nearly joined the Marines himself before deciding to give music a try instead, and even in retirement Brad was just about the epitome of a Marine, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out. If it was a little hard to keep from being jealous of. Because Nate was an idiot.

Walt still didn’t like the actual bodyguarding part, though, and he opened his mouth, no doubt to suggest something utterly stupid, like going to a bar in a town where practically everyone there would recognize him, and Tweet his location to all and sundry who cared to come stalk him, while in the midst of receiving death threats.

“No,” Nate said before he could say anything.

“But – ”

“Walt.”

Walt glared, and Nate stared back, raising his eyebrows. Brad ignored them both in favor of watching the parking lot, but he looked unconcerned over who was going to win this one. As well he should, because Nate would physically sit on Walt if he had to. Nate was no Marine, maybe, but he kept in shape, and he topped Walt’s height by a good four inches.

After a moment, Walt deflated. “I hate you.”

Nate nodded. “As long as you hate me from home, I’m good with that.” Walt didn’t actually stick out his tongue at Nate, but Nate suspected it had been a close thing.

He grinned and clapped Walt on the shoulder. “Some sleep will do you good, Walt. We’re going to push through this thing in one more week, tops, you’ll see, and then we can really celebrate.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Walt grumbled, but he sounded mollified.

They headed toward Nate and Walt’s cars, parked next to each other. Brad and Walt were slightly ahead, but they both turned back when Nate stopped short.

“Shit,” Nate said, realizing. “I forgot my cell.” He rolled his eyes at himself for being so scattered. “You guys go on,” he said, turning back to the studio.

“Nate,” Brad called from behind him. Nate turned back to see Brad staring at him with an almost worried expression. He hesitated, as if torn, glancing at Walt, then said, “We can wait if you – ”

Nate waved a hand in denial. “I’ll be fine, Brad. See you tomorrow.”

Brad pursed his lips, but nodded, turning back to Walt. Nate waved once more, and headed back to the studio entrance. He heard Walt’s car pulling out of the lot behind him as he used his key to get back inside; this late, everyone else at the studio had long since gone home. He didn’t bother locking the door behind him, as he’d be in and out in a moment.

He knew exactly where he’d left his phone – in the breakroom next to the coffee machine – and headed swiftly through the darkened and silent corridor toward it, humming Walt’s to-be first single off the new album absently to himself.

Idly, he debated whether to stop for takeout on the way home or just make do with what he had in the pantry. He wasn’t really in the mood for soup, though, which is about all he had in there. Chinese might really hit the spot –

The only warning he had was a slight rustle and a whuff of breath behind him. Nate spun around, flinging one arm up instinctively, and that was the only reason the descending baseball bat didn’t cave in his skull.

He caught the blow on his left forearm instead, and Nate actually heard the crack as the bones snapped.

The world seemed to slide sideways for a moment. Then pain such as he had never known flooded his body, threatening to drown him in its embrace. Nate fought desperately against the blinding haze of it. If he passed out now, he knew, he was a dead man.

He lashed out with his near foot, catching his assailant a solid blow on the knee. The man cursed and stumbled back, his face an indistinct blur in the dark hallway.

Every move Nate made sent a fresh jolt of agony through his arm, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. Somehow, even through the fear and pain, a small part of Nate’s mind found the space to reason coldly: he would never survive this if he gave his attacker room to swing the bat again.

Without giving himself any more time to think about it, Nate flung himself at the man, fighting to close the distance before the other could get the bat up again. He collided with the man just as the other straightened, and his momentum drove them both back into the wall. Nate heard the grunt as his opponent’s air was driven out of him and his head thunked solidly against the plaster.

Pressing against the other’s body, trying to keep him pinned without using his bad arm, Nate grabbed the hand holding the bat with his good hand, and slammed it against the wall, once, twice, three times, until the other man let out a hoarse cry and dropped the weapon with a hollow clatter. Nate then tried to bring his fist up to punch the man in the head, but the fucker abruptly wrenched out from under Nate’s weight. He clamped his hand on Nate’s left arm, the one he had broken.

Then he twisted.

Nate barely recognized the scream that ripped out of him then as his own voice, as the pain suddenly intensified a thousandfold, slamming through his body like a freight train. His knees buckled under the onslaught, and Nate felt his body hit the floor. His head cracked against something sharp.

This time when the world skewed sidewise, it stayed that way.

Everything seemed to rush away from him, like a rapidly receding tide. Nate vaguely realized that he was losing consciousness. That was bad, he knew, but he couldn’t remember why.

Time seemed to slow and drift. There was something wet under his cheek, and he felt a blow on his side, and then another, the man kicking him perhaps, but the blows seemed far away and unimportant. Everything seemed far away and unimportant.

So this is it, he thought, dimly. This was how he was going to die. He thought he should be more upset about that, but it seemed like too much effort. The best he could summon up was a kind of mild regret.

He would have really liked that Chinese food. And to kiss Brad once, maybe. Too bad, too sad.

From a thousand miles away, he thought he heard glass breaking, but it was probably just symbolic or something. Then there was a rushing sound, and someone said something, and then there was something that sounded like an animal roaring, and more noises, but it all slipped away into a comfortable blanketing buzzing haze before Nate could make any sense of it, and then there was blessed darkness.

Waking was like surfacing from a deep, still pool of oil, something smooth and clinging and viscous that resisted his rise, and Nate couldn’t seem to get the last film of it off him even though he knew his eyes were open. He blinked up at an unnecessarily harsh florescent light and tried to figure out what was going on, and why he felt like he weighed a thousand tons.

“Oh, you’re up.”

The grumpy voice which said this was joined in Nate’s field of vision by an equally grumpy face, peering down at him with an expression that somehow managed to be annoyed and concerned at the same time. Nate marveled at him, because that was really a pretty neat trick.

“Don’t try to move,” Grumpy-Yet-Concerned told him. “You’ve had the ever-loving shit beaten out of you, and you’re also on some serious drugs. Trust me, you don’t want to know what you’d feel like without them.”

Nate processed this slowly, or tried to, and licked extremely dry lips. It took a couple of tries before he got out: “Who?”

“Don’t have any details on that, sorry,” Grumpy-Yet-Concerned replied. “I’m just your doctor.”

“No,” Nate tried again, “Who… you?”

Grumpy-Yet-Concerned blinked. “Oh. Dr. Timothy Bryan. You’re in the ER at Baptist Hospital. You’re pretty banged up, but you’re going to be okay. Eventually,” he added under his breath, and Nate was fairly sure he wasn’t supposed to have heard that part. He licked his lips again.

“Nice,” Nate croaked, “…meet you. Thanks for… savn me.”

Bryan looked at him a moment, then shook his head, seemingly in bemusement. “Nice to meet you too, Mr. Fick, but I’m not the one you have to thank.”

Nate wondered what that was supposed to mean, but his eyes were sliding closed again. Vaguely, he felt Bryan put a surprisingly tender hand to his forehead, soothing.

“Go back to sleep, sir,” Bryan said. “We’ll talk more later.”

Nate was only too happy to obey.

He was woken again, he had no idea how many hours (days?) later, by raised voices just outside the slightly ajar door to his hospital room. Nate blinked, and realized he must have been moved from the ER at some point. How long had he been out? He focused slowly on the argument outside:

A female voice first: “Sir, I’m sorry, but our visiting hours – ”

“I really don’t think I can express,” a rasping, achingly familiar voice cut the first off, “how little concern I have for your visiting hours at this particular juncture. You and your visiting hours are preventing me from doing my job,” and here the voice took on an unmistakable air of menace, “and I do not care for people who interfere with my ability to do my job.”

“Sir, I will call security if I have to – ”

“Brad?” Nate said, but it only came out as a whisper. He gathered himself and put more strength behind his voice. “Brad.”

The voices outside cut off, and a moment later the door opened the rest of the way to reveal Brad on the threshold, an upset-looking nurse hovering just behind him.

Nate blinked, because Brad was a sight. His jacket hung off him, one sleeve almost entirely ripped away, and the once-white button down shirt beneath it was liberally soaked and splattered with blood. He had bandages swathing his right hand, and altogether he looked like an extra from a disaster movie.

Nate didn’t know that he did extra work on the side. Were they filming a disaster movie in Nashville right now?

“Nate,” Brad said, something raw in his voice. He strode forward, toward the bed, but stopped himself short halfway, biting his lip, almost as if he was unsure Nate wanted him there. Which was pretty funny considering how adamantly he’d been trying to get in. For his part, Nate didn’t think he’d ever been so happy to see anyone in his entire life, even if Brad really should have changed out of his costume first.

He noted worriedly, though, that Brad looked utterly haggard. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, and there was at least a day’s worth of blond stubble on his face. When was the last time he’d slept? He shouldn’t overwork himself with two jobs like that.

“Are you okay?” he asked Brad. He would be really upset if Brad wasn’t okay.

Brad stared at him a moment. “Am I – ” He cut himself off, and turned to glare at the nurse. “How many drugs do you have him on?”

Nate thought there might have been more to the conversation after that, but the placid, oily pool reached up to him again, and he was gone.

The third time he woke up, he really woke up. He knew because there was a lot less filmy haze, and a lot more pain – the dull, throbbing kind that promised it wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. It seemed to be everywhere.

“Ow,” he stated. That really pretty much summed it up, he thought.

“Nate?”

Nate looked to his right to see Walt sitting in the chair next to his bed. Walt looked like shit, like he hadn’t changed or showered in days.

“You look like shit, Walter,” Nate rasped. His voice sounded like his vocal cords had been rubbed with sandpaper.

Walt smiled tremulously. “That’s rich, coming from you, you asshole,” he shot back, but his voice was unsteady, and Nate was alarmed to see the kid actually had tears in his eyes.

He looked down at what he could see of himself, and had to concede that Walt had a point. His left arm was encased from shoulder blade to fingertips in a plaster cast, and was suspended in a traction sling. Under his gown, he felt tightly wrapped bandages squeezing his torso, from which he concluded he had at least one broken rib, too; trying to take a deep breath confirmed it, and Nate winced. He lifted his right arm, queasily ignoring the IV lines plugged into it, and felt the cap of bandages swathing most of his head. Christ.

“Yeah,” he said, “I think I might win at the looking like shit contest, at that.”

Walt laughed a bit hysterically, and rubbed his hand across his face.

“How long have I been out?” Nate asked. “Am I okay?” He cleared his throat. “Is there any water?”

“Water – uh, yeah,” Walt said, leaping up. “Be right back.”

He scurried out, returning in a few moments with a cup and a woman in a white coat. The first proved to be water, and the second proved to be a Dr. Emily Vardoz.

“What happened to Dr. Bryan?” Nate asked.

“Doc Bryan’s our ER attending,” Dr. Vardoz explained cheerfully. “I’m impressed you even remember him, actually. I’m your doctor up here in the ICU.”

Nate was startled. “I’m in intensive care?”

“Not for very much longer,” she assured him. “You took a nasty blow to the head, and for a little while there was some concern you might slip into a coma, but that danger’s past now.”

A coma? Nate was stunned. But the doctor was continuing:

“We’ve also ascertained that you have no internal bleeding or subdural hematoma, though we’ll do another MRI just to be sure. You lost a fair amount of blood from the wound on your head, and you have three cracked ribs and a hell of a lot of bruising, but other than that your worst injury is to your arm.” She indicated the cast.

“And how bad is that?” Nate asked evenly. The traction and the size of the cast didn’t point to any simple break.

“Both your radius and ulna were initially broken clean through with transverse fractures, but subsequent trauma to the break area complicated matters quite a bit. We had to perform surgery to realign the pieces, and you now have four pins holding your arm together. There was, unfortunately, quite a lot of muscle and tissue damage, too. Physical therapy should be very effective once the bones heal, but… there will be some loss of function, I’m afraid.” She gave him a look that managed to be sympathetic without being cloying. Next to her, Walt swallowed, looking ill.

Nate just nodded slowly, taking it in. “I see,” he said, finally. “Thank you, doctor.”

“You’re welcome,” she answered. She tilted her head at him, eyes intent, and said carefully, “You were very lucky, you know. It could have been a lot worse.”

Nate snorted. “Yes,” he said, “it most definitely could have been.”

Walt said, hesitantly, “So does that mean you remember… what happened?”

“Up until the point where I hit my head,” Nate told him, “I remember every second of it.”

He did, too. He didn’t think the memory of those few scant, horrific minutes would ever be erased as long as he lived. Someone had tried to kill him, and had nearly succeeded. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to completely encompass that notion.

“Can you tell us about it?” Dr. Vardoz asked. Nate was pretty sure this was to test his memory function more than anything else, but that was fine. He told them the story in short, clipped sentences, trying to ignore the horrified dismay on Walt’s face, concentrating on Dr. Vardoz’s calm, clinical expression.

“ –And then I felt my head hit the edge of something, and that’s all I remember,” he finished.

Dr. Vardoz nodded approvingly. “Not to sound callous, but the clarity of your recall of the moments leading up to your head injury is a very good sign. Like I said, we still have more tests to run, but in my opinion it’s a good bet you’ve suffered no long-term brain damage at all.”

Walt flinched at the words “brain damage”. Nate felt a bit queasy at the idea himself.

“He was going to smash my skull in,” Nate murmured, still amazed. “If I hadn’t turned around…”

“The important thing is, you did,” Dr. Vardoz said firmly.

“Yeah,” Nate said absently. Then it finally clicked, that he was still missing half this story. He looked up at Walt.

“Why aren’t I dead?” he asked, sharply.

Walt looked shocked, and even the unflappable Dr. Vardoz blinked. “What?” Walt said.

“Why aren’t I dead?” Nate repeated. “I was out for the count, Walt. Totally at that asshole’s mercy. He was obviously trying to kill me, so why didn’t he finish the job? Why’d he just leave?”

“Why did he leave?” Walt said, incredulously. “You think –”

He broke off, seeming at a loss for words. He darted a look at the doctor, who took the hint. “I’ll leave you and Walt here to talk,” she said to Nate. “I’ll be back to get you for some tests later, Nate. Also, there’s going to be a police officer coming by at some point for your statement. Think you’re up for that?”

Nate nodded.

She smiled. “I figured you would,” she said. “You’re a very brave man, Mr. Fick. Don’t forget that.”

He smiled politely at her. He didn’t feel particularly brave. He felt like someone who’d gotten the shit beaten out of him.

After the door closed behind her, Nate looked at Walt, expectantly.

“Nate,” Walt said, all in a rush, “I am so, so sorry about all this. I can’t believe – I should have known – ”

“Walt,” Nate interrupted. “This is in no way your fault, do you hear me? You are not allowed to blame yourself for anything.”

“But – ”

“No,” Nate said. “The guy obviously thought I was you – which makes him an even bigger idiot than I thought, but it was dark in there, so I guess he couldn’t – but that is not on you, Walt, it’s on him. I – ”

Walt’s eyes had gotten wider and wider as Nate spoke, and finally he shouted, “Nate!”

Nate stopped. “What?”

“He didn’t think you were me. He wasn’t after me. He never was.”

Nate blinked, confused. “He wasn’t?”

“No.” Walt hesitated a moment, then blurted, “He was after you.”

Nate stared. Walt’s words didn’t seem to make any sense. “Me? Why would he be after me?” Walt was the celebrity. Nate was nobody. Why would someone be stalking him?

Walt looked pained, like he really didn’t want to answer. “Because,” he said, miserably, “because, you’re, uh – ”

He made a gesture that could mean anything. Nate stared a second longer, and then it clicked.

Oh.

“Because I’m gay,” he finished, flatly.

Walt ducked his head, not meeting Nate’s eyes. “Yeah.”

Wow, some part of him marveled, clinically. I’ve been gaybashed. I, Nate Fick, have been the victim of a hate crime.

It seemed completely insane and yet perfectly logical at the same time, and he wasn’t sure which of those was worse. He supposed this meant he was a statistic now. He looked at Walt, who was still busy studying the floor, avoiding Nate’s gaze.

In three years of working together, he and Walt had never once specifically discussed Nate’s sexuality, which was also kind of crazy when he thought about it. He had assumed Walt just didn’t care, but now he wondered if Walt’s silence on the subject meant something else. He wondered if Walt had been one of those who held their noses about his orientation all along.

The thought made his heart ache dully, that their friendship might not be anything like he’d thought it was. Had Walt just been putting up with him all this time because he thought Nate would help him become successful? Did he think Nate was just a faggot who happened to be a good manager?

Nate didn’t know, but now that the notion had been planted in his mind he couldn’t shake it. It seemed all too plausible to him now; Walt was a squeaky clean farmboy from rural Virginia who still went to church every Sunday, had almost joined the Marines, and now sang country music. What was there in that background to incline him to be gay-friendly? Nothing, that’s what.

Nate felt sick to his stomach. He’d been an idiot, but maybe he could at least do some damage control. He owed Walt that much, at least.

“Walt,” he said, finally, “I’m sorry.”

Walt’s head came up. “You’re sorry? Sorry for what?”

“For putting you in a position to have to deal with… this.” He made the same gesture toward himself Walt had. “I know it’s going to be awkward, once the story gets out, and I don’t want anything to interfere with the new album or, or your image.” He took a deep breath, looking down at his sheets. “I can recommend a couple of people to take over as your manager. Bryan Patterson over at Arista, for one – he’s leaving the label to start his own managing firm, and he’s an excellent – ”

“Nathaniel Christopher Fick,” Walt cut in, “you will shut the fuck up, right now.”

His voice fairly shook with fury, and Nate glanced up, startled. Walt was staring at him with a look that strongly suggested he wanted to punch Nate in the face.

“Are you fucking serious? You really think I give a shit about my image right now? You really think I would dump you like a hot potato after you almost got beaten to death? Because it might be awkward?”

Walt’s voice had risen with each question, and he was shouting now. “Well, fuck you, Nate! I don’t know what the hell I ever did to give you such a low opinion of me, but I am not some – some – some pansyass homophobic dipshit who’s gonna turn tail and abandon the one guy who’s had my back all this time!”

He broke off, chest heaving, still glaring at Nate. Nate had never seen him so furious; he hadn’t even known Walt was capable of being this angry. Nate was aware that his mouth was hanging open, but he couldn’t seem to gather himself. And anyway, Walt wasn’t through yet.

“I am not embarrassed this happened to you, Nate, I am ashamed it happened. I am ashamed that there are assholes out there who think horseshit like this makes them good Americans. How anyone could look at you and not see – ”

He stopped again, gulped for air. He continued, more quietly but with no less intensity, “When I came out here three years ago, I didn’t know shit. Hell, I’d never been more than thirty miles away from home before, for God’s sake. I didn’t have a goddamn clue what I was doing, and the only reason I wasn’t eaten alive is because you were there to keep the shit from rolling down on me. I trust you more than I trust anyone I’ve ever met in my life other than my parents. You think I don’t know what a friend you’ve been to me? You think I’m going to let you walk away, ever?”

He pointed a finger at Nate. “Fuck that noise. You’re stuck with me, Fick. I don’t care if you fuck horses, you are still my manager. And my friend. You got my back, and I got yours. So there.”

There was a ringing silence. Nate swallowed. His face felt like it was on fire, he was blushing so hard, and he hoped desperately he wasn’t going to do something ridiculous like start blubbering.

Then Walt seemed to come back to himself, and realize what he’d been saying – or yelling – and flushed even redder than Nate probably was. He palmed the back of his neck, looking down, and actually shuffled his feet.

They were going to embarrass each other to death at this rate. Just to break the stretching silence, Nate said the first thing that popped into his mind. “Well, horse-fucking would prove some of Brad’s theories about country music, at least.”

Walt stared at him a second, and then they both cracked up laughing. And if the laughter was slightly hysterical, and if it hurt Nate’s ribs to do it, that was okay. It was worth it.

When they’d both calmed down a little, Nate reached over and took Walt’s hand tentatively. Walt gripped it back without hesitation.

“Thanks,” Nate said, quietly. “And I’m sorry, Walt. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

“Damn right,” Walt retorted. “Don’t let it happen again.”

They smiled at each other. Then Nate winced as he fell back on his pillow, and Walt’s smile transformed to a worried frown.

“Shit, Nate, you’re exhausted. I should let you get some rest.”

“Not yet,” Nate said, shaking his head. “Not until you’ve told me what happened after I got knocked out.”

“Nate, I really think that – ”

“And where’s Brad?” Nate interrupted, suddenly realizing he hadn’t seen him once since he’d woken up. He wouldn’t have thought Brad would just abandon his post, even if it had turned out Walt was in no danger after all.

And what about me? a traitorous voice inside him whispered. He had no illusions Brad felt about Nate anything like what Nate felt for him, but he would have at least thought Brad would be concerned for him as a friend.

“Walt? Did he even come down to see me?” Nate asked. His throat was not closing up, dammit.

“Of course he did!” Walt exclaimed. “But… he had to leave.”

“To go where?”

Walt sighed, and said reluctantly, “He had to go down to the police station.”

Nate was confused. “What, to give a statement about the notes? Why couldn’t he do that here?”

Walt shifted, looking miserable again, like he always did when giving people bad news. Nate stared at him with an awful suspicion growing in his mind.

“Walt,” he said slowly, “Brad’s not under arrest, is he?”

“Not… exactly, I think,” Walt said. “But they were pretty insistent that he come along.”

“And why is that?” Nate asked, quietly. He had a very bad feeling he already knew the answer.

“Because the reason that guy didn’t kill you,” Walt said, finally, “is because Brad killed him first.”

Later, when Nate had finally convinced Walt to go home, shower, and sleep, in that order, he lay quietly in his hospital room. His arm and his ribs and his head – and most of the rest of him – throbbed with slow, regular pulses of dull pain, but he was too wrapped up in his thoughts to give it much notice.

He reviewed in his head again the story Walt had told him. How Brad had only let Walt drive a couple of blocks away from the studio that night before insisting he turn around. How Brad had jumped out the moment they’d seen Nate’s car was still in the lot, not even waiting for Walt to stop. How they’d found the studio doors locked from the inside – and then they’d heard Nate scream.

“He picked up that big metal ashtray thing by the entrance and threw it through the glass,” Walt had said, still sounding amazed by it. “Thing’s gotta weigh two hundred pounds, and he handled it like it was nothing.”

Walt hadn’t seen what happened after that, because Brad had ordered him to stay outside and call 911 before dashing through the shattered door, and Walt, having seen what Brad’s face had looked like right at that moment, had wisely decided to do as he was told.

“I only saw the aftermath,” Walt had said. “Right before the ambulance got there. But it was… pretty bad.” From Walt’s expression when he’d said that, Nate was willing to bet that “pretty bad” was a distinct understatement.

Christ, he’d thought that was a hallucination, the bloodied disaster movie extra Brad he’d seen. But apparently he’d been all too real.

Walt had said Brad had only said one thing to him, after, while they were waiting in the ER for the word on Nate, before the police had arrived.

“He said… he said the guy asked him if he was there to save his filthy faggot lover.” Walt had stumbled over the words. “That’s how we realized he’d never been after me.”

“What did Brad answer?” Nate had asked.

Walt had shrugged uneasily. “I don’t think Brad answered him with words.”

Nate didn’t know how to feel about all this. He couldn’t be sorry that the man who’d tried to kill him was dead, but his heart ached that the death was on Brad.

He knew Brad would likely scoff at this. Brad was a warrior, one of the few men Nate had met in this day and age who merited the title, and Nate knew he’d done tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq before mustering out. Brad had killed before, Nate was sure of it.

But Nate also knew there was a big difference between killing enemy combatants in a warzone, and killing a civilian in a hallway in Tennessee – no matter what that civilian was doing in that hallway.

Even if Brad felt no moral qualms over it whatsoever (and Nate doubted that was true), the legal repercussions could be disastrous. Nate would have to do whatever he could to make sure Brad didn’t suffer for this.

“Mr. Fick?”

Nate looked up to see a dark-skinned man in a cheap sports coat and slacks in the doorway. He flashed a badge.

“I’m Detective Espera. You got a moment?”

Nate smiled tiredly. “Right now I’ve got nothing but moments, Detective. Please come in.”

Espera grinned back and sauntered in, closing the door behind him. He dragged the chair by Nate’s bed back a little ways – respecting Nate’s personal space, Nate noted with approval – and seated himself, pulling out a notepad and pen from an inner pocket.

“I’d like to get your statement on what happened Thursday night at the recording studio, sir,” he said. “The doctors said your recall of it was very good.”

Nate nodded. “Of course, Detective, but first, tell me what’s happening with Brad Colbert.”

Espera’s affable expression shut down. “I can’t give you any information on that right now, sir.”

Nate leaned forward, intent. “You know he saved my life, right? That man was trying to kill me, and he would have succeeded if Brad hadn’t shown up when he did.”

“That’s one interpretation of the events, sir,” Espera replied, “but at this time – ”

“No, Detective,” Nate retorted, “it is the only interpretation. I remember what happened, and that man was doing his damndest to make sure my skull got caved in. One more minute, and he would have had his chance. Brad Colbert was acting to save my life. You can be assured of this.”

Espera gazed at him a moment, then flipped back a couple of pages in his notebook. “The name James Trombley mean anything to you?”

Nate shook his head. “No.”

“Well, that’s who Colbert killed,” Espera said.

“That’s who tried to kill me, and who Brad stopped from doing so,” Nate countered instantly.

Espera snorted softly, giving Nate a wry look. “You sure you’re not a lawyer, Mr. Fick?”

Nate didn’t smile. “I will be whatever I need to be to make sure justice is served, Detective Espera. Brad Colbert should be getting a medal for this, not an arrest record.”

Espera raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that? You didn’t see what happened, did you? You were unconscious by the time Colbert broke into the studio.”

Nate didn’t answer, but his silence was confirmation enough. Espera leaned back in the chair, affecting a nonchalant pose Nate didn’t buy for a second. His manner slipped a little, too, becoming less formal.

“Your boy Colbert killed James with his bare hands, dog,” he said. “Broke his nose, his jaw, and his eyesocket, and then you know what he did? Choked him to death. Just squeezed the life right outta him. That sound like a hero to you?”

Nate felt shock roil through him, but he fought to keep his face blank, and won. It didn’t matter. Or, it did, but not enough to change things. As Walt had put it, Brad had had Nate’s back, and so Nate would have his.

“It sounds,” Nate replied evenly, “like someone doing what they judged they needed to do to take down a would-be murderer. As you said, I didn’t see it, but neither did you. Of all people, I trust Brad to apply the proportionate response to any given situation, and so should you.”

He and Espera had a brief staring contest. Rather to Nate’s surprise, the detective looked away first, chuckling a bit. “Yeah, you definitely missed your calling, man.”

Nate suddenly felt bone-tired. “Just tell it to me straight, Detective,” he said. “Is Brad under arrest or not?”

Espera regarded him a moment longer, then huffed another short chuckle. “If what you say is true about Trombley trying to kill you – ”

“It is,” Nate interjected.

“ – then no. Good Samaritan Law, dog. If your man Colbert had a reasonable belief that your life was in danger, he is authorized to use force to stop the perpetrator, up to and including lethal force. God bless the great state of Tennessee, eh?”

Nate sagged, not even trying to hide the extent of his relief.

Espera grinned. “They might make him pay for the door he smashed, though.”

Brad never returned to the hospital.

Nate didn’t realize he wasn’t coming back at first. After Espera had left, Nate had slept for the rest of that day and through the night, taxed to his limits. He’d woken feeling much better in mind, if not in body, and eagerly looked forward to seeing Brad, speaking to him.

It wasn’t even his physical infatuation with the man anymore, or at least not completely. Nate needed to see the person who had saved his life, to thank him. And to make sure Brad was okay in turn.

But it was his parents and sisters (and their husbands, and their kids) who came in a few hours after Nate’d woken, not Brad, having flown in from Baltimore and then come straight to the hospital from the airport. The rest of the day was therefore taken up in soothing maternal tears and paternal righteous rage and older-sisterly combinations of both. Nate was honestly worried his oldest sister Sabrina was going to stage an impromptu Gay Pride parade right there in the ICU, she was so outdone. Meanwhile everyone talked at once and young children wandered underfoot and Mark and Steven were each on a separate and continuous round of cell phone calls to apprise what seemed like half the world of Nate’s status, and the hospital staff watched in bewilderment at their apparent invasion by the world’s most politely stubborn barbarian horde.

Walt was there too, manfully submitting to Nate’s mother’s weepy embraces as a Nate substitute, since it wasn’t really a good idea to hug Nate himself at that moment, but in the organized mayhem that was a typical Fick family function (no matter the cause), Nate never had a chance to pull him aside and ask where Brad was. Being bedridden sucked for more reasons than just the obvious, it turned out.

Eventually the hospital kicked everyone out, and then it was time for tests and scans and poking and prodding and more tests, all of which were a lot more painful and exhausting than Nate wanted to admit, and he dropped to sleep again immediately after for another twelve hours. And then his family was back again the next day and it was the same thing again, except that they also moved him to a different room, perhaps wanting to get his family away from intensive care, and it was all madness.

And Nate loved his family, he really did, but he was about ready to scream with frustration by the time he finally stole a moment with Walt, on the third day after Espera’s visit, by dint of claiming he needed to talk business a minute, and shooing everyone else out to go get coffee – always an effective lure among Ficks.

“Walt,” he said the moment the door shut behind his mother, “where the hell is Brad? I need to see him.”

Nate didn’t even bother trying to disguise the urgency in his voice. Walt looked down, and Nate’s heart sank; Walt had that bad-news look on his face again.

“Brad’s gone, Nate.”

Gone? “What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean gone. As in, no longer in Nashville.”

Nate stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

A flash of real anger crossed Walt’s face, and he said, “Yeah, well, that makes two of us. I thought he was – ” Walt broke off and shook his head, and went on tightly, “He caught me outside the hospital the day before yesterday – must’ve been right after the police cut him loose – and asked me to thank you for everything, but since his services were no longer needed – ” Walt practically spit that part, “ – he felt it was time to be moving on. His words.”

Nate didn’t even know how to respond to this. Brad had just – left? Without even saying goodbye? Without even doing Nate the courtesy of quitting his job in person, let alone everything else?

Nate’s body now knew what it was like to be literally kicked in the gut, but somehow this still felt worse.

He didn’t know what his face looked like, but it must not have been pretty, because Walt glanced up at him and winced. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier,” he rushed on, “but with your family and all – and I honestly didn’t believe at first that he meant it. That he would be that – cold. I told him that – told him, uh, a lot of things, really – but I guess he did mean it after all.” Walt shook his head, disappointment on Nate’s behalf writ clear on his face. “I’m really sorry, Nate.”

“Don’t be,” Nate said, mechanically. He wondered vaguely what else Walt had said to Brad, but it really seemed pretty irrelevant at this point.

Then the door opened to readmit the now-caffeinated and therefore hyper Fick flock, and the chance for any further conversation on the subject was lost. Nate was just as glad.

So. That’s how it was, then.

Brad Colbert had turned out to be not at all the person Nate had thought he was, but that was on Nate, not Brad. He’d built Brad up in his head to be this… Platonic ideal of a person, and Nate shouldn’t be surprised at all that the reality had failed to live up to the fantasy. Reality always did.

Here in the real world, where a man had tried to kill Nate with a bat because he liked men, and where Nate might never have full use of his left hand again, there were no white knights. There were only men who, thankfully, did their jobs well even if they failed at courtesy or friendship or – and that’s all it had been to Brad, clearly. A job.

Which was fine, Nate told himself. There had been no indication, outside of Nate’s own pathetic delusional yearnings, that Brad had had any reason to consider it anything more than that. And given that, maybe Brad’s solution was for the best: a clean, professional break in their (professional) relationship, before Nate had a chance to ruin it with a soppy display of gratitude, or worse, some hopeless and pitiful declaration of – something, to a man who obviously could never return the feeling.

No. This was good. This was better. Now Nate could move on. He had a life to move on with, and for that he would always be grateful to Brad.

And this hollow feeling in his chest, like something inside had been scooped out and thrown away, that would pass soon. He was assured of this.

Time flies when you’re having fun, which is probably why the next few months seemed to last an eternity as far as Nate was concerned.

Physical therapy sucked even more than pop culture depictions of it had led him to expect it would. His therapist was a sculpted mountain of a man named Rudy Reyes, who looked like he had recently escaped from the pages of a heroic Greek epic and talked like he was a regular on the Psychic Network. Or so Nate imagined, having never actually listened to the Psychic Network, but if they talked with perfect seriousness about the healing power of crystals and which incense aroma best helped in finding your inner core and aligning your chakras or whatever, then he was right on the money.

Which wasn’t to say Rudy was bad at his job, because he really, really wasn’t. Rudy, in fact, was terrifying in his cheerful, smiling relentlessness when it came to his mission to get Nate’s hand working again – and improve the rest of Nate while he was at it – and absolutely nothing fazed or deterred him, least of all the horrible mood Nate was invariably in when they worked together. His ability to placidly ignore the curses and verbal abuse Nate heaped on his head during their sessions (and the one shameful time Nate had tried to deck him) should probably be declared a mutant superpower.

Nate knew the way he was behaving was disgraceful, regardless of whether it bothered Rudy or not, but he couldn’t seem to help it. Worst of all, he couldn’t even take pleasure in his improvements. Each time he caught himself feeling satisfied over his improved musculature, or at regaining a new fraction of the range of motion of his hand, it was immediately followed by disgust at himself. So he could pick up a pen with his left hand and hold it for ten seconds; a toddler could do that. Was Nate really congratulating himself on achieving the manual dexterity of a baby?

It was as if some part of him felt like he didn’t deserve achievements, or didn’t deserve to feel good about them, at any rate. Which made no sense at all, and Nate knew it. But he had this tangled snarl of hurt and rage and more hurt lodged within him, and who else could he unload it on, other than himself?

No one who deserved it, anyway. Certainly Walt and his family deserved none of it, and Nate was determined that they would never even know his rage was there. Even his anger toward Rudy was an insufficient outlet, a tiny fraction of what he kept bottled up inside, because Nate was frankly scared of what could happen if he let it loose.

Not least because he knew what everyone would assume was the cause of it if he did. Poor Nate Fick, traumatized victim. Look at his PTSD. Let’s put him in more therapy.

Fuck that, Nate thought. He was no victim, and he sure as hell didn’t have PTSD. His attacker was dead; he had his closure there. His problem came from a far, far more pathetic cause, one which Nate had no intention of telling anyone about, ever. It was Nate’s fault, this problem, and he would fix it on his own.

Broken hearts mend. And surely hearts that had had no business getting broken in the first place mended even faster, right?

In addition to ruthlessly policing his diet, his exercise regimen, and even his sleeping time (Rudy had Ideas about the essential importance of meditation and candles and Nate didn’t even know what all to the success of Nate’s recovery), Rudy had also forbidden Nate from returning to work until all his injuries were healed. And Walt, the traitor, had backed Rudy up on this. Nate hadn’t known how to explain to them that this only gave him interminable free time to wallow in the sucking tar pit that was his emotional state without giving up far more intel than he wanted to, so he’d gritted his teeth and borne it as well as he could.

His nieces and nephews had made admirable distractions for a while, until his parents and sisters finally bowed to the inevitable pressures of career and school and life, and headed back to Baltimore after almost two months of camping out in Nashville to help him out, with occasional flights back and forth for absolutely essential things. Nate was sad to see them go, but relieved that they were no longer throwing their lives into upheaval on his behalf.

The problem was, now he was alone.

Oh, Walt came by regularly, and Ray visited him a number of times, and any number of other acquaintances and colleagues (some of whom frankly surprised him) made a point of stopping by at least once or twice to see him and offer solidarity. Detective Espera even came by once, and shared a beer with him and talked about the Memphis Tigers and his three little daughters. And of course he had his sessions with Rudy, too.

But that wasn’t enough to fill the blank hours between, and keep him from brooding on something he’d never had and never would. It did nothing for his frustration when trying to do even the simplest tasks that required two hands, only to have his bad hand spasm or crap out on him. It did nothing for the nights he woke up, dripping with sweat from nightmares he refused to recall, or the even worse nights where his arm throbbed and ached and cramped and refused to let him sleep or concentrate on anything.

Without telling anyone, because it was no one else’s business, Nate had stopped taking anything stronger than Advil for the pain, because the absolute last thing he needed on top of everything else was an addiction to painkillers. No point in taking risks. And if lately he’d needed to drink half a bottle of bourbon to get to sleep without them, well, bourbon was still better than Percoset. And wasn’t like he needed to be at work the next morning, was it?

No one needed to know. He was fine on his own.

It was probably inevitable that of all people to find out what was really going on, it would turn out to be Ray.

Walt and Rudy were predictable, you see. Rudy’s visits were scheduled, and Walt never came by without calling ahead first to make sure Nate was available, because Walt had actual manners. So Nate always had plenty of warning to fix things up before either of them came by, or to beg off with a plausible excuse if it was really not a good idea for either of them to see him. He’d had to cancel his last three appointments with Rudy, now, but Nate’d told him and Walt both that he was down with the flu, so that was okay.

Ray, by contrast, clearly regarded manners as an unfortunate nuisance that only happened to other people, and so had no qualms whatsoever about showing up at any time and with no warning. The last time he’d dropped in unannounced Nate had very nearly been caught, but had managed to pass it off as simple sleepiness, and had kept Ray from seeing in any further than the front hall before getting rid of him.

This time, though, there was no hiding it.

Nate came awake with a groggy jerk at three loud bangs on his front door, followed less than a second later by the sound of the door slamming open and Ray’s voice shouting gleefully, “Get your hand off your dick, Fick! Your best pal Ray-Ray is here to entertain you!”

Jesus, how could he have forgotten to lock the door? Instinctively, Nate tried to lunge up off the couch, with some crazy idea of cleaning up before Ray walked the twenty feet from front door to living room in his head, but his balance was shot to hell, and he fell heavily between the couch and the coffee table instead, nearly knocking the table over and producing a loud enough crash to wake the dead. He groaned at the impact on his still-tender ribs.

There was a pause from the entrance hall, and then Ray laughed. “Dude, are you like stampeding buffalo through here or – ” He rounded the corner to the living room entrance, and the sentence died unfinished on his lips.

Nate struggled upright on the floor and glared at him balefully, watching Ray’s eyes travel slowly over the wreckage of the room – dirty clothes and shoes and books and DVDs and CDs and old vinyl records scattered everywhere, used and crusty dishes and glasses crowding every flat surface, the overturned lamp Nate had stumbled into a couple of days ago and not bothered to pick up, the opened packages of junk food oozing crumbs and sauce onto the loveseat and armchair and carpet – and come to rest on the most damning evidence of all: the coffee table. Which was currently festooned with no less than four empty bottles of Jack Daniels, along with an indeterminate number of beer cans, several of which had fallen over when Nate jostled the table in his fall and were now desultorily glopping the remains of their contents onto the table and off onto the floor.

“Holy shit,” Ray said at last, in the quietest voice Nate had ever heard from him.

This wasn’t going to go well, so Nate might as well be surly from the start. “What the fuck do you want, Ray?” Nate muttered, pulling himself up with his good arm to get his ass back on the couch. His mouth tasted like a rancid gym sock. A gym sock filled with monkey shit.

Ray stared at him a moment, then without another word turned and walked into the kitchen. After some clanking and shuffling that was probably Ray kicking some of the trash on the floor out of his way, he returned with a mostly-clean glass of water and three Advils, which he handed to Nate silently.

Nate tossed the pills and water down and handed the glass back to Ray, who took it and then just stood there, studying Nate like he’d never seen him before. His continued silence was getting positively unnerving.

Finally Nate couldn’t stand it anymore. “I should get a prize,” he rasped. “You think there’s a Boy Scout badge for rendering Ray Person speechless?”

Ray snorted reflexively, but his expression didn’t alter. “Probably, dude,” he replied, “but they might take points off for being a fall-down drunk. I hear the Scouts frown on that.”

Nate considered trying to work up some righteous indignation at the accusation, but who was he kidding, really. “Sanctimonious bastards,” he opined instead.

Ray raised an eyebrow. “At least you still have all your SAT words.”

Nate gave him a look, and slumped against the back of the couch, suddenly aware that he was wearing nothing but boxers and a filthy T-shirt. He tried to remember the last time he’d changed, or showered, and couldn’t. He must look delightful, and smell even better.

Ray eyed the couch dubiously, then shrugged and flopped down next to Nate anyway. “Well, my friend,” he said, “I’ll say this for you: when you decide to fall apart at the seams, you don’t do it by half-measures.”

“Fuck you,” Nate answered, wearily.

“Now, is that any way to talk to your pal Ray, who brought you yummy pills to make the bad hangover go away?”

“If you’re going to talk in rhyme,” Nate said, “You can leave.”

Ray snorted again, and fell silent for a bit. Nate was content to let it stretch this time. He tried to think, to plan how to counteract whatever undoubtedly wild overreaction Ray was going to have to all this, but his head hurt and his arm hurt, and he was too exhausted to give it more than a token attempt. The jig was well and truly up. In a way, Nate was glad.

Eventually, Ray said, quietly, “So. Is this about the thing?”

There was no need for him to specify what “the thing” was, of course. Nate’s impulse was to deny it immediately, but instead he forced himself to actually think about the question.

Was this about the thing? Or was it about – the other thing? Nate had thought he knew, but now he wasn’t so sure anymore. He wasn’t sure there was a difference between the two anymore. He wasn’t sure there ever had been.

“Yes,” Nate said. “No. I don’t know.”

Ray huffed a breath. “Okay then.”

Nate opened his mouth to say something, he didn’t know what, but what came out was: “He left.”

The instant he said it, he wished he could take it back, but it was too late, even if Ray probably had no idea who he –

Ray had turned his head and was looking at Nate consideringly. “Yeah,” he agreed, “he did.”

Nate’s surprise must have shown on his face, because Ray rolled his eyes. “Oh, please,” he said. “I may be a dumb hick from Missouri, but I am not anywhere near as stupid as either you or Brad think I am. You really think I didn’t know what was going on between you two?”

Suddenly the dam broke, and Nate was abruptly furious, because even if Ray knew who Nate was talking about, he obviously still didn’t get it, at all. “Between us? There was nothing between us, Ray. That’s the whole goddamn point!”

Ray’s brow furrowed. “Huh?”

“It was a job, Ray,” Nate tried to explain, though God knew why he was bothering. “It was just a job to him, and that’s completely fine. It should be fine. He and I worked well together, and he was – it was professional to him, of course it was, and I was the one who went and blew it all up into this – thing, and turned it into some fucking gayass Lifetime movie melodrama, because I’m just this – ”

He stopped himself, took a breath. Ray was staring at him in something like astonishment, and Nate almost cringed under the look, but forced himself to go on anyway. In for a penny, in for a goddamn pound.

“It’s disrespectful, Ray. To him. He saved my life, he put blood on his hands to do it, and I have the – the audacity to not be satisfied with that? It’s pathetic.”

There was silence for a moment. Ray was still gazing at him with that expression of – what? Shock? Incomprehension? Disapproval? Nate decided he didn’t care anymore. He sighed, feeling all the anger run out of him like water, leaving only weariness behind. He was getting very good at weariness these days.

“It’ll be fine, Ray,” he said. “It was stupid, but it’s past now, and I’ll get over it. I just – felt like getting a little drunk first.”

Ray blinked, and closed his mouth, which had been hanging slightly open. He glanced at the overflowing coffee table, then back at Nate. He shook his head, seeming to be having a highly irritating conversation with himself. Abruptly he barked out a laugh that sounded equal parts exasperated and appalled with the world, and stood.

Nate guessed he was leaving, and wondered if Ray was done with him now, or if he’d get over it eventually. He wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t. “Are you going to narc on me to Walt?” he asked, expecting the answer to be a resounding Yes.

Ray fixed him with a gimlet stare. “Dude,” he said, “I am not going to say a goddamn word to Walt.” With that, he marched into the kitchen again. After several minutes of slamming and crashing and clanking noises, he stomped back into the living room clutching two grocery bags, stuffed with what Nate realized was all the rest of his alcohol stash. He opened his mouth, but Ray forestalled him with an imperiously pointed finger.

“Listen up, Fick. I would tell you that you are the dumbest motherfucker to ever walk this earth, but unfortunately I’ve already met him. So congratulations, you’re only the second dumbest motherfucker to walk the earth. Fortunately for you, you have a Ray, and you’d better thank your lucky fucking stars that you do.”

Ray pulled out his cell phone, and snapped a picture of the room before Nate could react.

“Ray – ”

“Shut up,” Ray said. “That was for insurance. Now. Take a fucking shower, and either hire a maid or burn this shit down, because the way it and you look right now you’re going to end up on Cops, and my TiVo is broken. I’m taking this shit – ” and he shook the bags at Nate, “ – the hell with me, because you don’t need it.” He looked shifty. “And because I’m having a party next week. To which you – ” he pointed again, righteousness reasserted, “– are not invited. I’ll be back.”

Nate stared at him in total bewilderment. “You will?”

“Count on it, yo,” Ray informed him ominously, and flounced out.

After recovering a bit from his hangover, not to mention the capricious depredations of Hurricane Ray, Nate eventually decided to take his advice on the shower, though not the part about the maid. Or the part about burning his house down, because even in his current state Nate wasn’t emo enough for that.

Instead he cleaned the place himself, slowly. He didn’t nearly get to everything, but he cleared off the coffee table and picked up the worst of the trash, and if the dishes weren’t washed, at least they were now all in the kitchen. It was as good a way as any to pass the time if he wasn’t going to the store to get more bourbon.

And he wasn’t, yet.

In a supremely fucked-up way, Ray’s promise to return, bizarro!Terminator-like as it was, had given Nate something to look forward to. Even if Ray showed up escorting guys with butterfly nets to take him to the loony bin (which Nate thought was probably a little over-the-top even for Ray), it would at least be different. Maybe something worth staying sober for, even.

Most likely, though, Ray had just lied through his teeth about not saying anything to Walt, and Nate was going to find a posse composed of Ray, Walt, Rudy, his mother, his second-grade English teacher, and fucking Dr. Phil camped on his doorstep, all just itching for an intervention.

Well, whatever. He’d always wanted a chance to tell Dr. Phil that he was full of shit.

The man was coming for him in the hallway.

Nate panted and scrabbled against the shadowed air, but it held him like a fly in amber, trapping his feet, squeezing his lungs. He couldn’t move, and the man was coming for him.

Panic screamed across his nerves, but the jellied air oozed down his throat, and he couldn’t scream aloud. He couldn’t make a sound, and the man was coming for him.

He didn’t want to see the man, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t turn away. And the man reached him, and smiled, and the bat came down and Nate saw it was going to smash in his face –

Nate lunged awake in his bed, shaking and drenched in sweat, and lurched into the bathroom just in time. He vomited noisily in the toilet, and afterwards he clutched himself to it for a moment, resting his cheek against the cool porcelain.

Now we remember why we don’t go to bed sober, don’t we, Nathaniel?

Nate waited until the shaking had subsided enough for him to stand, and then went back into his bedroom and started pulling on clothes. There was a 24-hour liquor store a mile from here.

Fuck Ray. If he wanted to have an intervention, Nate might as well give him his money’s worth.

Brad was standing in the doorway.

Well, a Brad-shaped figure was, anyway. Because it couldn’t actually be Brad. That was absurd.

Nate blinked, and squinted against the way-too-fucking-bright sunlight streaming in past the hypothetically-Brad-shaped person on his porch. When had he answered the door? Maybe this meant he’d finally destroyed all his brain cells and was now having alcohol-induced hallucinations. Pretty impressive for a mere one-month bender; Nate was obscurely proud of himself.

“Nate?”

“It’s supposed to take years,” he told the Brad-shape, “but here you are already!” He frowned. “No pink elephants, though. I distinctly recall that I was promised pink elephants. Maybe they come later.”

He waved it away, and headed back to the living room, peripherally aware that the Brad-shape was following him. He needed to sit down, only the coffee table jumped in the way. “Insolent,” he muttered, as the Brad-shape grabbed him just in time to keep him upright.

“Unhand me, specter!” he declaimed, and giggled, shoving his bad hand in the Brad-shape’s face. “Unhand, get it? ‘S funny. Like Shakespeare.”

“Hilarious, sir. Maybe you should sit down.”

“Amazing, you even sound like him,” Nate said dreamily, as he magnanimously allowed himself to be lowered onto the couch. “Magnanimous is a good word,” he informed the Brad-shape. “It means ‘lofty and kinglike’. Bet you didn’t know that.”

“I did know that, actually.”

“Liar,” Nate accused, and then laughed to show he didn’t mean it. There was no need to be mean, after all.

Nate lost track of things for a moment, and then the Brad-shape was offering him a glass of water.

“Here, Nate. Drink.”

“Uh-uh,” he refused. “If you eat or drink in the fairies’ land, you can never go back to the real world. I’m here strictly on a time-share basis.”

He thought he heard a sigh. “The fairies are making an exception in this case, sir. It’s perfectly safe. I’ve got you.”

Nate snorted. “Yeah, that’s what you said the last time,” he said, meaninglessly, since he knew perfectly well Brad had never come to fairyland with him before.

He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw the Brad-shape in front of him flinch. Nate felt guilty for some reason, even though he totally hadn’t poked or pinched him or anything, so he grabbed the water and drank it down, except the parts that fell out of the glass wrong.

“There,” he said, firmly, and belched.

“Excellent, sir. How about bed now?”

“Don’t be absurd, Brad-shaped person,” Nate said. “The bed has unass – unsack – Crap.” He tried again. “Un-ac-cep-ta-bly neg-a-tive con-no-ta-tions.” He enunciated each word carefully.

“I see.”

“Couch is for sleeping,” Nate explained. Really, this should be obvious.

“Couch it is, then.”

“Booyah,” Nate agreed absently, and glanced around. “Look at that, I’m already here. That’s convenient.”

“Indeed it is, sir.”

“‘Sir’,” Nate mocked. “I swear, you sound just like Brad.”

“Do you… do you miss him, Nate?”

“Brad?” Nate asked. He frowned, considering. “I don’t think ‘miss’ is the correct word.”

“What would be the correct word?”

“Um.” Nate concentrated, trying to put the words together right. “You know how when they cut your leg off, you can still feel the leg even though it isn’t there anymore? And it itches and hurts, but there’s no way to soothe it?”

There was a pause. “Yes, I – ” The other cleared his throat. “I’ve heard of that.”

“Whatever the word for that is, then,” Nate told him. There was no answer.

He sighed; talking about Brad made him sad. “I’m going to couch now,” he announced. “Before the water kicks in.”

He stretched himself out on the lovely, lovely couch, and let his eyes drift closed. The room was spinning a bit, he could tell, but as long as it stayed on the other side of his eyelids he was okay with that.

After a little bit, he felt something soft and blanket-like drift down over him, and he snuggled gratefully.

“Goodnight, Nate,” he heard someone say, but he was slipping into sleep too quickly to reply.

Nate was woken by his bladder informing him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t get to the toilet right now, he was going to have a very embarrassing accident.

Dammit. Nate lurched up off the couch and stumbled toward the bathroom. Something was odd, but he didn’t have time to note what it was. His head felt like someone was pounding it against an anvil, and his mouth tasted, if possible, even worse than the day before.

He made it to the toilet just in time, and pissed for what felt like thirty years, groaning his relief. He washed his hands arthritically afterward, leaning against the sink. He felt like he was about a thousand years old. After some consideration, he decided that as long as he was here, he might as well brush his teeth and try to get some of the diseased monkey shit taste out.

He was scrubbing his tongue with as much vigorousness as he could muster when his brain finally woke up enough to process what was wrong with the bathroom, which was that it was clean.

No, not just clean; spotless.

Nate lowered his toothbrush slowly, gazing around at the sparkling tile and gleaming porcelain. Even the bit of floor behind the toilet had been scrubbed clean. His glass shower door, which Nate had never managed to keep free of at least one layer of soap scum, was nearly hazardous in its crystal clear invisibility. The towels were fresh, too, and even his toiletries had been wiped off and arranged neatly on their shelf.

What the fuck, really.

Nate rinsed his mouth on autopilot, and then went back into the bedroom, which, he now saw, was also immaculate. Not only were all the clothes and books off the floor and the endtables cleared, someone had fucking vacuumed. The shelves and lampshades looked suspiciously like they had been dusted. The bed was made with fresh sheets, the quilt folded up in a neat square at the foot. The sheet corners were tucked with such tight, surgical precision that Nate bet he could bounce a quarter off the center of the bed.

He stared some more at the sheet corners. No, not surgical precision. Military precision.

Nate had always thought that expression about a person’s blood running cold was a hokey cliché, but he actually felt the icy wash along his veins now, enough to make him break out in goosebumps.

No. No, no, fuck no. That had been drunken dreaming bullshit, yesterday. That had not fucking happened.

But it had, and Nate knew it. Because he apparently had a cosmic “KICK ME” sign attached to his forehead for all the gods and fates to see.

Frankly, Nate thought they were exceeding their quota, these days.

Nate walked slowly back to the living room. Other than the blanket flung across the couch and a few faint, indelible stains on the carpet and upholstery, the room looked like it was ready to be put up for sale. No trace of the wreckage remained. The air smelled like Febreeze and coffee.

There was a soft clink from the kitchen, as of someone setting a glass down on the granite counter.

Nate swallowed and didn’t move for a moment. Then he told himself to man the fuck up already, and walked into the kitchen.

The kitchen was, unsurprisingly, also pristine. Brad sat at the far end of the island in the center, laptop open in front of him and mug of coffee at his elbow. He looked up when Nate entered, and for a moment their eyes met.

He was beautiful. Nate had forgotten how beautiful he was and not even realized it.

Brad looked away after only a moment, though, and went back to his laptop. “Good morning,” he said, expression perfectly neutral, and indicated where a second steaming mug, a glass of water, and Nate’s bottle of Advil sat in front of the stool around the corner from him.

Nate didn’t know what else to do, so he moved to the stool and sat down. He picked up the bottle, shook three pills into his hand, considered, and added one more before downing them quickly with water. He picked up the mug and sipped. As before, the coffee was perfectly prepared.

Brad appeared to be ignoring him, eyes still on his laptop screen. He sipped his coffee. Nate sipped his coffee. Brad clicked on something, and Nate resisted a sudden impulse to hurl the mug across the room, just to break up this strange Stepford parody of a domestic scene.

Nate considered and rejected about forty possible conversational openers, and finally in desperation resorted to simply stating the obvious.

“You cleaned my house,” he said. He hadn’t meant it to sound like anything, but it came out sounding like an accusation. Nate supposed it was one.

Brad was looking at him now, and his look seemed… cautious. He tilted his head, conceding that he had, indeed, cleaned Nate’s house. “I was given an order,” he said, and his lips twitched in something that was either amusement or irritation, or possibly both.

Nate didn’t get the joke. “An order?”

Brad lifted his laptop and turned it around, setting it in front of Nate. Nate looked at the screen, which had Brad’s Gmail account up on it, open to an email with two attachments. Nate looked at the text first:

So much for your precious situational awareness, you donkey cock. Now pull your thumb out, grow a pair, and get your goddamn braindead Viking ass out here and clean up your fucking mess.

Love and sloppy kisses,

Ray-Ray

Nate looked at the attachments. One was an electronic ticket in Brad’s name for a one-way flight from LAX to Nashville, and the other was the photo Ray had taken the day before, labeled “La Maison Fick”, with Nate’s address as the file name.

“He had no right,” Nate mumbled, still staring at the photo. It looked even worse on film than he remembered it looking in real life. Nate was dimly relieved that Ray had at least had the decency to make sure Nate himself hadn’t been in the picture, but that relief was obscured by his rising indignation over the entire stunt.

“I don’t think what he has a right to do has ever been much of a concern to Ray,” Brad remarked.

Nate reached out and closed the laptop, and picked up his mug again, looking over it at Brad. Brad gazed back at him steadily now, waiting for Nate to say… whatever he was going to say.

“So, this must have been a fun twenty-four hours for you,” Nate said, finally. “Flying nearly 3,000 miles to play housemaid for your drunkass former employer. Was it everything you dreamed it’d be?”

He hadn’t realized how angry he was until he heard the ugly, sarcastic tone of his own voice. How dare everyone just – invade him like this, decide that they all knew better than he did how to live his life?

“Nate – ”

“This is not your ‘fucking mess’, Brad,” Nate cut in. “It’s mine. I don’t care what Ray goddamn Person thinks, it’s not your job or your right to fix me. It wouldn’t be your job even if you hadn’t picked up and left without a fucking word three months ago. Your pity – ” Nate fairly spat the word, “ – is neither needed nor fucking appreciated!”

He was shouting by the end, and teetered on the brink of ordering Brad to get the fuck out of his house. Instead he shoved his stool back, not even caring that it fell over, and stormed out of the kitchen into the living room. He turned in a circle in the middle of the room, too angry to stay still, months’ worth of suppressed fury now on the boil.

Brad had followed him, and now stood in the entranceway dividing the kitchen from the living room, watching Nate with his goddamn blank I’m-feeling-nothing face on. Nate wanted to punch it. Mike Wynn had mentioned Brad’s nickname in the Marines when he’d first recommended him to Nate, and he decided it was the most fitting handle for a person Nate had ever heard in his life.

“So?” he demanded. “Explain yourself, Iceman, because I don’t get it. You don’t even give enough of a shit about me to quit your job to my face, but Ray sends you a picture of my dirty house and you’re on the next plane to scrub my goddamn toilet? What the fuck, Brad? I’m just – I don’t have the energy for this shit, okay? I have got more than enough to deal with without having to try and figure out what your fucking schizoid problem is. So either explain it to me, or – ”

He stopped, unwilling to finish the sentence. Even with how furious he was, he didn’t want Brad to leave. God, he was pathetic.

Brad’s stone face held for a moment, but then his jaw worked, and Nate saw him swallow. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for just a bit too long for it to be a blink. He looked like a man preparing to jump off a cliff.

Then he said, “I didn’t come here to try to fix you, Nate. Or to offer you pity. I came here to apologize. And to confess.”

Nate frowned. What the hell did that mean? He crossed his arms, indicating he was listening. But then his bad arm twinged, and he quickly dropped the stance. He tried to make it casual, but he saw Brad note his wince, and Brad’s mouth tightened.

“What happened to you was my fault, Nate,” he said. “I failed you, and for that I am more sorry than I can ever hope to say.”

Nate blinked. What? That was absurd. He opened his mouth, but Brad held up a hand, asking him to let him continue.

“My whole life,” he said, “in the Marines and after, my business has been to assess threats and respond to them accordingly. I am a Recon Marine, Nate; it is my job to see what no one else sees, to notice what everyone else misses. To stop bad things, before they happen. And I didn’t do that here. I failed.”

He shook his head, disgustedly. “I should have realized. I should have known that Walt was never the target, that you were. I even talked to you, the day it happened, about how it made no sense, but I didn’t follow through on my instincts until it was too late to keep you from getting hurt. You almost died, and when I saw you on the floor of that hallway – ”

He stopped, and swallowed again. “And that was the other way I failed. I lost – I do not let my emotions cloud my judgment, Nate. Or to affect my actions. Ever. But this time, I was – compromised. I left with Walt that night because I was convinced I was overreacting, that if it had been anyone other than you…”

He trailed off, gaze fixed somewhere past Nate’s right shoulder, as if seeing some very unpleasant vision on the wall behind him. Nate felt frozen in place. Was Brad saying – No. He couldn’t be.

Brad blinked, coming back to himself, and when he spoke again, it was with a seeming non sequitur. “I was engaged, once,” he said. “My high school sweetheart. She left me, and married my best friend from high school instead. Former best friend,” Brad amended. “I was deployed overseas when I found out.” He smiled, thinly. “Joint Dear John letter.”

Nate raised an eyebrow. He didn’t know where this story was going, but regardless, that was cold.

“That same day,” Brad continued, “I came within a hair’s breadth of snapping the neck of another Marine during a routine training drill. I told myself it was because he fucked up the protocols, because I was angry with him, but that wasn’t why. And right then and there I realized how I had let my feelings compromise me. How dangerous it was for me to – ” He shook his head. “It couldn’t be allowed. And I resolved that it would never happen again.”

He shifted to look Nate directly in the eye. “And it never did – until that night in the recording studio.”

Nate couldn’t breathe. He felt like all the air had suddenly left the room.

“I know how to incapacitate a man without killing him, Nate. I am very, very good at it. But that night – when I saw you, I thought you were dead. You were on the floor, and there was blood everywhere, and – And then that fucker looked at me, and fucking smirked, and asked me, ‘You here to save your filthy faggot lover?’ And I – ”

He didn’t finish, but he didn’t need to. Brad’s hands were clenched into fists, and his eyes…

Nate had understood, intellectually, how dangerous Brad could be. But the man currently in front of him was nothing even remotely like the cool, collected Iceman he’d known all this time, and Nate saw exactly why Brad had imposed such very tight controls on himself. This was a bit like what Nate imagined it was like to be in the same room as an uncaged tiger, and this was only at a memory.

But the only truly unnerving part of it is how Nate wasn’t afraid of him in the slightest. He could be frightened of dreams and of failure and of his own freshly discovered capacity for self-destruction, but of Brad Colbert, never.

Nate took a deep, slow breath, and watched as Brad methodically reeled himself in, stuffed that murderous rage back inside and sealed it up. Less than five seconds, and he was the Iceman again, hands relaxed, eyes calm. It was… impressive.

“After, I was – I didn’t know what to do. I shouldn’t have left the way I did, I know. It was deplorable, not having the courage to face you and ask forgiveness for what I did, to not stay and make amends. But to realize the – the depth of what I felt for you, to realize I could feel that way about anyone, much less another man…”

He shrugged, helplessly. “It’s no excuse to say I panicked, but I did. I had to get away. I thought, if I was far away, if I let it fade… And I assured myself that you didn’t feel anything for me, anyway.”

Nate’s eyes widened. What?

“I thought, surely if you had,” Brad said, “you would have shown it in some way. But you were always so – professional. And I – ”

Nate couldn’t help it; he threw back his head and laughed.

He laughed, and once he’d started, he couldn’t stop.

He laughed for what felt like years, laughed until he was bent over and wheezing. He laughed, clutching his side at the stitch he’d given himself, and then he laughed some more. Even to his own ears, he sounded like he’d lost his mind.

“Oh, holy shit,” he gasped at last, wiping tears from his eyes. He staggered over to the couch and flopped down on it, still chuckling. Brad was still across the room, staring at him with an expression somewhere between outrage and alarm, and that sparked another bout of giggles from Nate.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Nate wheezed. “But oh my God, Brad. Ray was so right. We really are the dumbest motherfuckers to ever walk this earth. Both of us.”

Brad opened his mouth, looking like he was considering getting seriously pissed off, but Nate just kept snickering. “You really thought,” he said, pausing every other word for a snort of laughter, “that I – didn’t want – oh, Jesus, that’s the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.” He grinned at Brad like a maniac. “I wanted to jump your bones from the second I laid eyes on you, you moron.”

He hiccupped. “Professional,” he repeated self-mockingly, and went off on a fresh jag of snorts and chuckles.

Brad stood there, clearly trying to maintain his indignation, and failing. After a long moment his lips twitched up, reluctantly, into a wry half-smile.

He huffed out a breath and walked over to the couch. “You certainly know how to kill a moment, Fick,” he grumbled. “I bare my soul to you, and you laugh?”

Nate beamed up at him, and Brad’s smile widened in response, seemingly against his will. “That smile,” he murmured, blue eyes gazing fondly down. He shook his head and sat down, right next to Nate so their hips pressed together. Nate leaned his head against Brad’s arm, and after a moment Brad swung his arm behind them to wrap it around Nate’s shoulders, so his head rested on Brad’s chest instead.

Nate let out a long sigh, feeling his mirth drain from him, but also his tension and stress and the last vestiges of his anger. Nothing in his life had ever felt more right than having Brad’s arm around him.

“What a pair we are,” he murmured, and Brad’s arm tightened around him in agreement.

“You don’t owe me an apology, Brad,” Nate told him. “Well, no, you do owe me an apology for fucking off without talking to me first, but you most definitely do not owe me one for anything else. And you certainly did not ‘fail’ me. If it had been anyone else on the job, I would be dead right now, so you’ll forgive me if I consider your involvement to be firmly in the ‘win’ column. You will stop beating yourself up for not being superhuman. Agreed?”

Brad looked down at Nate. “I’m sorry I fucked off without talking to you first. As for the other…” He drew a breath. “I’ll agree, if you agree that we are going to have a talk at some point about why exactly you’re trying to give yourself liver failure before you hit thirty. Yes?”

Nate grimaced, but it wasn’t like he had a leg to stand on, here. “Fine,” he muttered. He rubbed his cheek against Brad’s shirt, glorying in the physical contact. He felt like it had been centuries since someone had really touched him. Brad’s hand squeezed his shoulder, massaging it gently, and Nate felt a warm ribbon of feeling uncoil somewhere in his gut.

He tilted his head back so he could see Brad’s face, so close to his own. “Yeah, we’ll talk about that,” Nate told him. “At some point.”

“Good.” The hand was moving up and down now, stroking his arm. The air felt different, like it was being slowly charged with electricity. Nate restrained a shiver, and it wasn’t because he was cold.

He decided that as long as Brad had been so honest with him, he should be too. “Just so you know,” Nate said, “I’m pretty sure that I’m in love with you.”

Brad’s hand stopped moving.

Nate tried not to freak out, forced himself to keep going. “I just thought I should tell you, because… And I’m not asking – it’s okay if you don’t – ”

He was cut off by Brad’s lips descending over his, sealing them together.

Nate gasped reflexively, lips parting, and Brad’s tongue slipped between them, tasting like coffee and something Nate knew instinctively was just Brad. The groan that escaped him then was entirely involuntary, and he returned the kiss in kind.

Their tongues tangled together as Nate sank back on the couch, drawing Brad with him, twisting one leg between them until he could push it behind Brad so that Brad’s body rested in the vee of his legs. Brad surged forward, seeking a deeper kiss, and Nate let out an “Ah!” as Brad brushed against his cock, rubbing it against his boxers.

Peripherally, Nate was slightly dismayed to realize he’d been in nothing but boxers and a T-shirt the entire time Brad had been here, and had never even noticed until now. But then again, at this point it was just less to take off.

Brad was backing off, though, breaking the kiss to stare curiously down at Nate’s crotch, and Nate abruptly remembered. “You’ve never done this with a man, have you?” Nate asked.

Brad shook his head, and Nate expected him to draw back, but instead Brad pulled in his hand from where he’d had it resting on Nate’s shoulder, and placed it almost delicately over the bulge in Nate’s boxers, pressing lightly. Nate’s head fell back and he moaned, thrusting up into Brad’s hand without volition.

“Oh God,” he rasped, hips undulating, and he opened his eyes to find Brad’s on his face, pupils blown hot as he watched Nate’s reaction to his touch.

“You like that,” Brad said, and the wonderment in his voice was almost more arousing than his hand now rubbing gentle circles on the cloth over Nate’s dick.

“Yeah,” Nate agreed, huskily. “Oh, Jesus, yeah.”

Brad hesitated, then moved to grab the waistband of Nate’s boxers. Nate lifted his hips, and Brad slid the boxers down and then off his legs. Nate’s cock bobbed free, already most of the way to hard, and Brad stared at it in frank fascination, still hovering over Nate’s body. Nate held himself still, letting Brad look his fill and get used to the idea, even though it was kind of killing him to have those unbelievably blue eyes on him and yet have no corresponding touch on his skin.

“This, too,” Brad said, tugging at the bottom of Nate’s T-shirt. Nate tilted his upper body up just enough to pull the shirt off one-handed and toss it somewhere before laying back down, fully naked now. Brad’s gaze ran up and down the length of Nate’s body, and the appreciation he saw there encouraged Nate’s dick to full hardness. Brad noticed, and licked his lips, but still didn’t move for a long moment. Nate tried not to expire on the spot from anticipation.

Finally, though, Brad reached down and gently grasped Nate’s cock, watching Nate’s face. Nate inhaled sharply, and Brad smiled a bit before his gaze returned to his hand, his air that of intense concentration as he moved it lightly up once, then down along the shaft. Nate could practically see Brad working out in his head the angle and method of jacking someone else’s dick, as opposed to his own, and found it worryingly adorable. Christ, he was really head over fucking heels, wasn’t he?

Then coherent thoughts fled as Brad abruptly released him to spit once, twice in his hand, and then began stroking him with intent, hard and slow. Nate’s back arched and his mouth fell open in panting, bone-deep grunts.

“Brad – ah – God,” he gasped, and then Brad’s lips were pressing into his and his tongue sweeping into his mouth, hand never pausing in its pumping rhythm, and Nate whined wordlessly into Brad’s mouth as sensation pulsed through him in waves, drawing in, bearing down.

“So beautiful,” Brad whispered against his lips, and Nate let out a hoarse cry and came all over Brad’s hand and his own stomach.

Brad jacked him a few more times, milking the rest of his come out of him, until Nate made a protesting noise and pushed at his hand weakly. “Too much,” he rasped, and Brad let him go, seeming reluctant. Nate slumped, his breathing harsh and ragged.

Brad nosed at his neck, nuzzling him while Nate came down from his orgasm, not seeming to care that he was getting Nate’s come all over his shirt. “Good?” he murmured, pulling back to look Nate in the eye.

Nate gave him an incredulous look. “Are you kidding?” he asked, voice still scratchy. Brad grinned rather proudly and leaned in for a slow, lazy kiss.

Eventually Nate decided he could move again, and broke the kiss to reverse their positions, moving Brad up and back so that Nate was on top now. Brad was still fully clothed, wearing a button-down shirt and jeans and even shoes, Nate noted with disapproval. That would never do.

Brad lay back and watched as Nate began to unbutton his shirt. To his humiliation, however, his bad hand proved to be unequal to the task. Nate felt his state of happy post-orgasm fading, to be replaced by frustration, the third time his hand slipped trying to push the second button through its hole. Dammit.

Then Brad’s hands closed over his, squeezing them tightly for a moment before moving them gently aside so he could undo the buttons himself. Then he reached up and grasped the back of Nate’s neck, pulling him down for a thorough, sloppy, brain-melting kiss, reminding him of why they were here. By the time Brad broke off, Nate was panting again, frustration forgotten. Brad smiled at him, and Nate grinned back, heart clenching a little bit.

Returning his attention to Brad’s shirt, Nate pushed it open to reveal a superbly muscled torso, the kind that only came with serious dedication to staying in shape. Nate ran his hands appreciatively over the ridges and grooves of Brad’s abdominals and pectoral muscles. He’d never had a better reason to be glad that his left hand had regained nearly all its sensory capability, even if the muscle control was less than stellar.

Nate leaned down to lick each nipple, smile turning wicked at Brad’s involuntary jerk and grunt at the touch. He brushed lower, trailing his hands to dip into the waistband of Brad’s jeans, and then back outside to roam down, just missing Brad’s groin to grip his thighs briefly, stroking. Brad gave him a dirty look.

“Tease,” he accused. Nate just grinned some more, and kept going, scooting backwards to allow his palms to travel the considerable length of Brad’s legs to his feet, where Nate disposed of Brad’s shoes and socks as quickly as he could considering he was using just one hand.

Then he climbed back up Brad’s body to claim his mouth for another kiss. Their tongues slipped and slid together lazily, and Nate used the time to push and maneuver Brad’s shirt off his arms, though he was hindered by Brad’s insistence on running his hands up and down the expanse of Nate’s back, and then down to grip Nate’s ass firmly in both hands. Nate gasped into Brad’s mouth as the move ground his sensitive, spent cock into the denim of Brad’s jeans. Brad bucked up with a moan of his own, and to his amazement Nate could feel his own dick twitching slightly in renewed interest already. Jesus.

“Okay, jeans off now,” Nate said, and moved back so Brad could take care of it. If Nate’s hand wasn’t up to undoing a shirt, button-fly jeans were out of the question.

Brad didn’t move for a moment, and Nate glanced up to see him watching Nate with an odd, intent gaze. Nate raised his eyebrows in inquiry, impatient at the delay, and Brad moved then, unbuttoning his jeans and shoving them off his legs with much more satisfactory haste.

Brad turned out to be a briefs man. Nate kicked Brad’s jeans off the couch and bent down to breathe hotly onto the cloth directly over Brad’s cock.

“Fuck,” Brad said harshly.

“Exactly,” Nate replied, and rubbed his face over Brad’s crotch a few times, feeling the length inside harden. Then he pushed Brad’s legs apart and crawled back up between them, holding Brad’s gaze as he slid his body up until their cocks aligned, Brad’s still covered in cotton. He ground down on Brad, sliding his right hand behind Brad’s neck to pull him up into a filthy open-mouthed kiss. Brad made incoherent noises as Nate plundered his mouth and rocked back and forth over his cock relentlessly.

When they finally came up for air, Brad stared at Nate in something of a daze. “You toppy little fucker,” he breathed.

Nate gave him a mock-affronted look. “Who, me?” he said, and ducked down, mouthing over Brad’s neck. He let his good hand travel down the length of Brad’s body until he reached the waistband of Brad’s briefs, and skimmed just underneath, so close and not touching – yet. He enjoyed how Brad’s hips moved seemingly of their own accord, seeking contact and not finding it. One of Brad’s hands came up, but Nate batted it away, moving his mouth down to pay close attention to Brad’s nipples while his hand rubbed and circled beneath Brad’s underwear, just missing Brad’s cock every time.

“Ah, God – Jesus, Nate,” Brad said, half complaining, half just wrecked. He arched up as Nate laved his nipple lovingly over and over with his tongue.

“I,” Nate said, punctuating his words with more licks and nuzzles, “am not toppy at all.” He still hadn’t touched Brad’s cock, instead scratching lightly at the hair surrounding it, dipping into the creases where Brad’s thighs met his groin, brushing his balls ever so slightly.

Brad sucked in a breath. “You’re a fucking liar, is what you are,” Brad answered, huskily, hips shifting restlessly. Nate noted he made no move to reassert control, though. Interesting.

Nate pulled his hand out of Brad’s underwear and braced himself over Brad’s body with his knees and his right hand, looking into Brad’s eyes. “I’m going to suck your cock now,” he told him very seriously. “Unless you have any objections, of course.”

Brad gazed back, unwavering. “No objections here,” and he paused, “sir.”

Damn. So that’s the game they were playing; possibly, the one Brad had been playing privately all along. Nate felt a jolt of lust course through him. Brad, it seemed, had hidden kinky depths.

“Good,” Nate answered him. He smiled slowly, making sure it was predatory, and leaned forward to lick a stripe across Brad’s lips before ducking down to settle himself between Brad’s legs. He reached up to grasp Brad’s briefs and pulled them down, at last freeing Brad’s cock.

It was just as beautiful as the rest of him, and gloriously erect, curving up toward Brad’s stomach. Nate took a moment just to appreciate the sight before moving to rub his lips lightly along the shaft, enjoying the slip of velvety skin over rock-hard flesh.

Brad’s entire lower body tried to arch up, but Nate was done with teasing, so he weighted Brad’s hips down with his right arm, and swallowed his cock down in one long smooth slide.

“Oh shit God yes,” Brad groaned.

Then he lost words completely as Nate blew him fast and hard, using every trick he knew to take Brad apart. Brad moaned and shook and tried to thrust up, but Nate held him down and suckled relentlessly, using lips and tongue and just a hint of teeth. It wasn’t very long at all before Nate felt a hand in his hair, warning him that Brad was going to come, but he ignored it, and moments later Brad gave a ragged shout and spent into Nate’s mouth, and Nate swallowed it all down, every drop.

At some point they’d relocated from the couch to the bed, where Brad had given Nate a sloppy, messy, and distinctly inexpert blowjob. Nate had been so turned on, though, by the notion of being the first Brad had done this for, that he’d come again almost immediately.

Now, they tangled together in the wreckage of the bedclothes, smelling of sex and sweat and more sex. Nate couldn’t say exactly how many hours later it was, but the sun was low in the west, slanting in through his bedroom windows, and Nate was pretty sure he’d woken up sometime in the morning. So, quite a while, to say the least. Nate had dozed, on and off, but Brad was out like a light, and had been for a while. Which was only fair; he’d gotten a hell of a lot less sleep in the last day than Nate had.

Nate, for his part, was content to lay now with his head pillowed in the crook of Brad’s shoulder and listen to Brad’s deep, slow breaths, feel the warmth of the long, lean body next to his. He felt loose and easy for the first time in longer than he cared to remember, like he’d had a wire strung somewhere inside him that had been twisting slowly tighter and tighter, and then it had gone suddenly slack and fallen away.

It was wonderful. Nate didn’t kid himself that everything was going to be hunky-dory from here on out, but for the first time he was able to think that things could get better. He hadn’t even noticed until now that he hadn’t really believed that was possible. Jesus, no wonder he’d been… the way he’d been.

Eventually Nate realized that he was ravenous, and gently freed himself from Brad’s rather octopus-like tangle of arms and legs to slide quietly out of bed, leaning over to lay a soft kiss to Brad’s forehead before heading to the kitchen to scrounge up something to eat. He was munching his way through a giant bowl of Cheerios when the doorbell rang.

Nate glanced down at what he was wearing – a pair of ancient cotton pajama bottoms and nothing else – and sighed. Apparently everyone was going to get to see him en déshabillé these days.

He opened the door to find Walt on the other side, arms crossed and with a determined expression on his face.

“Walt!” Nate said, sounding sheepish even to his own ears. “Um. Hi.”

Walt raised an eloquent eyebrow, and looked Nate up and down closely. Nate saw his eyes pause on Nate’s neck, which Nate realized now sported at least two very impressive hickeys, and tried unsuccessfully not to flush with embarrassment.

“Hi,” Walt said at last, and without further ado brushed past Nate and inside. Feeling rather like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Nate followed.

They reached the living room just as Brad entered from the bedroom side, looking even more disheveled than Nate, eyes heavy-lidded. Nate was grateful he’d put his jeans back on, at least, even if they weren’t buttoned, but it could not have been more obvious what the two of them had been doing than if they’d staged the scene.

“Walt,” Brad said, in greeting perhaps, but it was hard to tell. Nate found a moment to be impressed that Brad could pull off his blank-faced Iceman act even when still half-asleep.

“Brad,” Walt answered, flatly, and then walked up to Brad and punched him in the face.

“Walt!” Nate exclaimed, stunned. Brad staggered back until his legs hit the couch, and sat down heavily, staring up at Walt, who glared right back.

Nate prepared himself to jump between them before Brad exploded, but to his surprise Brad made no move to rise, only put a hand up to his jaw, working it gingerly. He didn’t even look angry, only… rueful.

“Welcome back,” Walt told him, evenly. Then he dropped Brad from his attention like a ton of bricks, and turned back to Nate.

“I ought to punch you too,” he informed Nate, “but I won’t. The flu, Nate? Really?”

Nate just blinked at him. Walt pulled a business card from his pocket and handed it to Nate, who was too taken aback by the events of the last thirty seconds to do anything except take it.

“I went down to the VA and talked to some guys,” Walt said. “They said this lady,” indicating the card in Nate’s hand, “is a psychologist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder cases, and that she’s very good. You have an appointment with her tomorrow at three o’clock, and if you don’t show, she knows to call me. At which point,” Walt said, threat clear in his voice, “I will be back, and I’ll bring Rudy with me. And Ray,” he added as an afterthought.

Well, that was just playing dirty, Nate thought, a bit dazedly. Walt hesitated, and shook his head, but then evidently decided to say something anyway.

“Fix this, Nate,” he said, and it was half a demand and half a plea. “I want my friend back.” Then Walt turned and marched out without another word.

Nate stared in the direction of the door for a good half a minute after he heard it close. Finally he turned to Brad, who was getting up from the couch.

“Did that just happen?” he demanded.

Brad looked wry. “Signs point to yes,” he replied, tonguing the inside of his cheek experimentally.

Nate shook his head and headed into the kitchen to get Brad a cold pack, Brad following. Nate made him sit at the island and hold the pack to his jaw while Nate made more coffee.

“Are you okay?” he asked Brad, setting down a mug in front of him.

“All squared away,” Brad assured him. He pulled the pack away and felt his jaw with his fingers, and his lips quirked in a small smile. “Kid would have made a good Marine,” he remarked, “once he was trained out of telegraphing his moves like that.”

Nate suspected there was no higher praise, coming from Brad, but was more interested in what else his comment implied. “You could have stopped him, couldn’t you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Brad gave him a look that was nearly offended. “Of course I could have.”

“Well, why didn’t you then?”

Brad looked rueful again. “When I told Walt I was leaving three months ago, he was rather – angry. Not that I blame him. Among other uncomplimentary things, he told me that he would punch me in the face if he ever saw me again.” Brad shrugged. “And I figured, who am I to make him a liar?”

Nate huffed a surprised chuckle, at Walt just as much as at Brad, and shook his head again. Brad’s gaze darkened a bit, and he reached out to cup his palm along Nate’s cheek.

“Besides,” he added softly, “I had that coming.”

Nate looked at him, then leaned forward to press his lips to Brad’s, briefly but passionately.

“Maybe,” Nate told him, “but you’re square with the house now, okay? No more beating yourself up.” He raised an eyebrow. “By proxy or otherwise. Got it?”

Brad’s answering gaze was full of heat. “Clear copy. Sir.”

Nate gave him an Oh no you didn’t look even as fresh desire uncoiled in his belly, and he felt his eyelids drop to half-mast. Brad almost succeeded in masking his look of triumph as he carefully slid the coffee mugs to the far side of the island and scooted his stool back, grasping Nate’s waist and pulling him in between his legs.

“It occurs to me, sir,” he said, with great seriousness, running his hands lightly up and down Nate’s torso, “that I have made you come in only two rooms of this house so far. I feel,” and he dipped his hands beneath the waist of Nate’s pants to grip his ass firmly, pulling him in, “that this is an unacceptable waste of available resources. May I suggest,” and he paused to capture Nate’s mouth for a brief but very dirty kiss, “that we take swift action to remedy this unfortunate state of affairs?”

Nate leaned forward and ran his tongue along the shell of Brad’s ear. “An excellent suggestion, Marine,” he said, low and harsh. “What do you recommend?”

Brad laid out his plan of action in exacting detail, and Nate grinned in hearty approval.

Much later, Brad picked up the business card from where it had fallen to the kitchen floor – fortunately not on the same side as the full coffee mugs. And Nate’s forgotten bowl of Cheerios. Nate made a mental note to start buying less breakable dishes. Or, alternately, stop having sex on the kitchen island, but the former option seemed more palatable.

“Dr. Susanna White,” Brad read, while Nate dug around in the pantry for the mop. “Are you going?”

Nate pulled his head back and looked at Brad. Brad’s face was calm, but Nate was getting better and better at reading him, and he saw the tension underneath the casual-seeming question.

Nate was tired of tension, so he snorted. “Do I have a choice?” he asked.

“You always have a choice, Nate,” Brad answered, seriously, by which Nate inferred that they were going to have to Talk about this. He sighed, and kicked the pantry door shut.

“You agreed,” Brad reminded him.

That they would talk about it, yes. The more fool him. Ignoring the mess on the floor for now, Nate went and fixed himself more coffee, taking his time about it. Brad, of course, just sat there patiently, and eventually Nate admitted to himself that trying to outwait a guy who’d been trained to stay motionless for hours, if necessary, to achieve an objective, was probably a fairly futile tactic.

He picked up the other stool and sat, concentrating on the mug cupped between his hands. Brad waited.

“The drinking… isn’t for the drinking,” Nate said, finally. “The drinking is for the dreams. If I’m drunk enough, they don’t come. If I’m not…”

He took a swallow of coffee, dismayed to realize his hand was shaking a little bit. But saying it out loud was admitting it was real, which was something Nate had avoided since… well, since this whole thing began. He forced himself to continue.

“It’s the same thing every time, and it’s so straightforward it’s ridiculous. It’s that night; the studio, the man with the bat, everything. The only difference is, in the dreams I can’t move. It’s like being trapped in molasses. Can’t defend myself, can’t breathe, can’t – ” Nate’s voice cracked, and he stopped for a moment, drank more coffee. “Sometimes I wake up before he reaches me, sometimes not, but every time, I know I won’t be able to get away.”

His fingers traced the rim of his mug. “The painkillers didn’t work, so I stopped taking them. I mean, they worked on the pain, but they didn’t do anything about the dreams, and I’d rather be in agony than – ” He stopped before he finished the sentence – I’d rather be in agony than ever be that afraid – but he thought it was probably obvious.

He didn’t look at Brad. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what Brad thought about it; he was afraid that he would see pity, or worse, contempt on his face, that Nate could let a few nightmares destroy him like this.

He snorted softly. “Pretty sad, huh?” he asked. “I mean, you went to war, saw things I can’t even imagine, and you’re – and meantime I get jumped by some dumb asshole with a bat, and just – fall apart.”

There was a long silence, during which Nate studied the bits of chicory floating in his coffee with great intensity. He waited to hear some empty platitude or insincere assurance, something that would make him feel worse than before.

“Do you know why I fell in love with you, Nate?” Brad asked.

Nate’s head came up and he stared at Brad, who was looking back at him with calm determination. There was nothing of pity or contempt in his gaze at all.

“I have gone to war,” Brad agreed. “And yes, I have seen shit you would not believe. I saw acts of the greatest bravery and the lowest cowardice. I saw beauty, and I saw horror. But most of all, I saw my brothers in arms get screwed again and again by the incompetence and stupidity and indifference of those who commanded them. And in the end, that was the part I couldn’t stomach. Not the killing, not… any of the rest of it. That’s war; it’s not pretty, but that’s the way it is. But being betrayed by our own… that part, I couldn’t take.”

He shook his head. “I remember thinking, if there were just one, just one officer I could have put my faith in… but there wasn’t.” He shrugged. “So I left. It killed me to do it, but I did. I still can’t decide if I regret it, but there it is.”

Brad’s eyes were far away for a moment, then he looked at Nate again. “You remember that day about two weeks after you hired me, when you and Walt had the meeting with that dickhead executive at MCA?”

Nate blinked, trying to think back. There were so many dickhead executives to choose from… oh yeah. “You mean Griego?”

Brad nodded. “That’s him. He was complaining about the delay on Walt’s album, and the ‘unnecessary personnel expenses’ he claimed you were incurring. Meaning me, I inferred.”

Nate snorted. “Not just you; he meant Person, too. Ray’s one of the best sound guys in the business, and he doesn’t come cheap. Of course, if he had let me hire Ray from the start like I told him we should, we wouldn’t have had to redo the three tracks that got botched to hell and back by the idiot he insisted we use instead, and we wouldn’t have been behind in the first place.”

Nate rolled his eyes. Of course Dave’s rates had been lower; he’d only come to Nashville because every recording outfit in L.A. refused to work with him anymore. And Griego was all, What? I never heard about the thing with Duran Duran! “And then he had the utter gall to suggest – ”

Nate broke off, felt a slow burn just at the memory. Griego, the pissant little weasel, had actually sat there and implied that the death threat notes were fake, a stunt that Walt – Walt, of all people! – had drummed up as an excuse for dragging his feet on completing the album. Nate had hardly been able to believe his ears.

Brad nodded. “Yeah. And you tore him a new asshole,” he said, gleefully. “Threatened to walk out on the label, and make sure they knew it was because he’d slandered Walt’s reputation, and deliberately stuck him with bush-league techs just to save a few bucks and – how did you put it? – crawl up the assholes of his superiors. Then you dared him to call you on it. And the little shitstain folded like a cheap suit.” Brad smiled beatifically, as at a fond memory.

Nate shifted uncomfortably. He hadn’t regarded that as one of his finer moments, personally, losing his temper like that. It was especially inappropriate that Walt (and Brad) had been sitting right there when it happened.

“And I remember thinking,” Brad said, returning to seriousness, “that if I’d had someone like you to follow in Iraq – someone who I could have had such confidence in his leadership, and in his willingness to go to the mat for his men – that maybe, I wouldn’t have left in the first place.”

Nate was dumbfounded. If he’d thought what Brad had said about Walt was a compliment…

Brad was watching his face, and nodded with satisfaction that Nate appreciated what Brad was saying. “Do you remember what I said to you after, on the way out?”

Nate did, emphatically. Not to get homoerotic about this, sir, but I could kiss you. Walt had laughed and agreed, jokingly. Nate had almost tripped over his own feet in the parking lot.

“I’d thought of it as a joke at the time,” Brad said. “It was only later that I realized I’d meant it.” He smiled, ruefully. “After that, I was fucked. So to speak.”

He reached over to take Nate’s left hand, laid it out flat on the countertop. He ran his fingers softly over the surgical scars on Nate’s forearm, traced gently where the muscles were slightly misshapen. Nate watched, feeling something like tears pricking the backs of his eyes.

“Before he cut me loose, Detective Espera told me what you said to him at the hospital,” Brad said. “Not just about me, but your statement about what happened in the studio before I got there. You realize that you held off a man armed with a lethal weapon with nothing but empty hands, and almost defeated him? While with a shattered forearm? Do you think just anyone could have done that? You really think that’s how a coward behaves?”

His eyes bored into Nate’s, insisting on an answer. Nate shook his head, dumbly. He’d never thought of it that way.

“No,” Brad said. “It isn’t. Trust me on this one.”

He gripped Nate’s hand in his, tightly. “I know a little bit about what it’s like to feel helpless, to feel like nothing you do can affect the outcome of events. But I’ve never been wounded in battle, like you,” daring him with an eyebrow to challenge his terminology, “so your comparing yourself to me is not applicable, Nate. And I have the utmost confidence that you, of all people, are fully capable of overcoming this thing. And I will have your six, the whole way, just like you had mine. You know that, right?”

Nate swallowed, and nodded. He gripped Brad’s hand back as best he could.

“What I don’t have, though,” Brad said, “is the knowledge to help you overcome it. That is outside my field of expertise, sorry to say. This doctor, though,” and he indicated the card lying between them on the counter, “she does have it, seems like. And we would be remiss,” he told Nate seriously, “if we failed to bring every weapon we have to bear on beating this shit into the ground. Am I wrong?”

Nate drew in a long breath, and picked up the card, examining it as if the typeface could tell him something profound. Finally, he looked at Brad again, and drew his face to his for a long kiss. After, he rested his forehead against Brad’s, and nodded.

“Okay,” he said, “but I’m going to tell her you compared her to a machine gun.”

Brad blinked, and then started to laugh. Nate grinned.

Nate squinted his eyes against the blazing Tennessee sunshine, even through his sunglasses, as he got out of the passenger seat of his car and gazed toward the building before them. Brad unfolded himself from the driver’s side and looked over the roof at Nate, waiting for his reaction.

The recording studio looked exactly the same as it always had. Nate didn’t know if he’d been expecting something different, or not.

Walt had suggested they switch to a different studio to finish the album, but Susanna – Dr. White – had advised against it, and Nate agreed with her. If he was going to get past this thing he had to face it, not run away. Get back in the saddle again, as he’d put it to Brad, just for the eye-roll it had produced.

“Okay?” Brad asked now. Nate nodded.

“Okay,” he answered, and walked toward the front doors, Brad on his heels.

They were halfway there when the front doors (with brand new glass on the left side, Nate noted) burst open, and Ray charged through them like a tiny bull on a giant sugar high.

“Bradley!” he shrieked, and launched himself at Brad, leaping up to latch onto his back, piggyback-style. “I missed you like the deserts miss the rain! Welcome back, pooky!”

Brad didn’t even bother to attempt to dislodge him, just stood there with a long-suffering expression on his face as Ray hung off him like the world’s most obnoxious clump of Spanish moss. “I think I preferred Walt’s welcome,” Brad said to Nate, mournfully.

Nate fought to keep his face straight. “Less psychological trauma that way, yes,” he agreed, earnestly.

“Fuck you, you love it,” Ray declared, and dropped back to the ground. “Jesus, it’s like climbing a fucking tree. Hey, Nate. You still a lousy drunk, or did Bradley here kiss it all better?”

“Hey, Ray,” Nate replied, very dryly. “Not that it’s your business, but no, at the moment. And yes.”

“Working on it, anyway,” Brad added. “It’s an ongoing project.”

They smiled at each other, and Ray pretended to make gagging noises.

“Jeez, to think I aided and abetted in this sap-fest,” Ray said. “I must be out of my goddamn mind.”

“I don’t think anyone would disagree with that assessment, Raymond,” Brad told him.

Ray stuck out his tongue at him. The doors swung open again, this time with more decorum, and Walt walked out, grinning fit to split.

“Welcome back, boss,” he said to Nate, and grabbed him in a back-thumping hug, which Nate returned with interest.

“Boss, huh?” Nate said, amused. “Funny, I thought you were in charge these days.”

“I’m only the boss of you when you’re too dumb to do it yourself,” Walt retorted. “Feel free to take back the reins anytime.”

Nate huffed a soft chuckle. “Touché,” he replied wryly.

Walt’s gaze fell on Brad, and he straightened, his expression the peculiar mix of defiance and guilt he’d worn every time he’d seen Brad since the face-punching incident. Privately, both Brad and Nate found this hilarious, but they’d been careful not to let Walt know that. He’d get past it in time, Nate knew.

“Hey, Brad,” Walt said, only slightly stiffly.

Brad nodded cordially to him. “Walt.”

Walt shifted a little uncomfortably, and couldn’t seem to think of anything to add. After a moment, Ray snorted.

“Not that I don’t just adore melting my ass into a steaming puddle of Ray-goo,” he said, gesturing to the baking sun overhead, “but maybe we could move this beautiful moment inside?”

“Shut up, Ray,” Walt said automatically, but his eyes were on Nate, worried. “This gonna be okay, you think?” he asked.

He meant the studio. Nate looked at it, then back at Walt.

“Let’s find out, shall we?” he said.

Nate wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or oddly disappointed that they had replaced the carpet in the hall. The four of them stood there, looking at the spot where Nate had almost lost his life, and there was no trace to show that it had ever happened.

Nate glanced at Brad, who looked to be busy reliving his own memories. After a moment, though, he met Nate’s gaze, and raised an eyebrow. Nate pursed his lips, thinking, and then shrugged slightly. Brad nodded, satisfied, and headed for the breakroom. Nate followed, because coffee was definitely the right idea at this juncture.

From behind them, Nate heard Ray tell Walt, “Man, it’s fucking creepy when they do that telepathy shit, I swear.” Walt snorted, and Nate smiled to himself.

He didn’t look back at the spot in the hall.

The track they were doing today was a cover, of a classic old song. Walt had initially been very uncertain about trying to follow in the wake of such legends as Patti Page, Patsy Cline and Leonard Cohen, but Nate knew Walt loved the song, and had convinced him to put it in. It was very different from Walt’s usual style, but that was why Nate thought it would work so well. Time would tell if he was right.

Nate, Brad, and Ray sat in the control booth, listening to Walt in the live room as he sang:

I was dancin' with my darlin to the Tennessee Waltz
When an old friend I happened to see
I introduced him to my darlin' and while they were dancin'
My friend stole my sweetheart from me.

I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz
Now I know just how much I have lost
Yes, I lost my little darlin' the night they were playin'
That beautiful Tennessee Waltz

She goes dancin' with the darkness to the Tennessee Waltz
And I feel like I'm falling apart
And it's stronger than drink and it's deeper than sorrow
This darkness she left in my heart

I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz
Cause I know just how much I have lost
Yes I lost my little darlin' the night they were playin'
That beautiful Tennessee Waltz.

There was silence a moment after Walt finished. Then Nate leaned forward and clicked on the mike.

“That was great, Walt. Let’s take a break and then do it again, okay?”

Walt sighed, sounding happy and sad at the same time, and nodded, taking off his headphones and heading out. Nate turned his chair around to look at Brad. He hadn’t really remembered about the lyrics to this song until Walt had started, but now… Brad looked back at him, and it was clear he knew exactly what Nate was thinking.

“Well?” Nate asked.

“See, here’s the problem with country songs,” Brad began.

“Jesus H. Christ on a lubed-up pogo stick, not this shit again,” Ray interrupted irritably. “Thank God we never took a road trip together, dude, we would have killed each other. I’m going to get more coffee.”

He stomped out of the booth in high dudgeon, and Nate shared an amused look with Brad. “You were saying?” Nate asked with a show of great interest.

Instead of answering, Brad crooked a finger at Nate, inviting him onto the couch. Nate smirked, stood, and swiftly plunked himself down in Brad’s lap, straddling his legs. Brad snorted a laugh and pulled him in for a lazy kiss.

“So what’s the problem with country songs again?” Nate murmured against Brad’s lips.

“The problem with country songs,” Brad replied, interspersing his words with exploratory kisses and nibbles along Nate’s neck and jaw, “is that they’re all misery porn. They never allow for the happy ending.”

“Really,” Nate said, dryly. “Misery porn, every single one of them.”

“Yes,” Brad confirmed, licking Nate’s collarbone.

“I think we might need a ruling on that,” Nate remarked, combing his hand through Brad’s hair.

“This one, for instance. Sure, that guy lost his sweetheart to his best friend, and he’s going to be sad every time he hears that waltz – not that he wouldn’t be anyway, because seriously, waltzes? – but it doesn’t tell the rest of the story.”

He pulled back to look Nate in the eye, gaze laughing and yet serious at the same time. “What if that guy finds out, a few years down the road, that losing his sweetheart was the best thing that ever happened to him? Because it led him on the road to finding the person who wouldn’t be his sweetheart, but the love of his life?”

Nate breathed in, shakily, held by those blue eyes so steady on his own. “I guess that would put a different light on it,” he conceded casually, but he let his own eyes say what he didn’t say aloud, and he felt Brad’s hands tighten on his hips.

“Exactly,” Brad said, and kissed him again. At length, he pulled away, and tilted his head thoughtfully.

“But you know,” he said, “even so? I think I like it.”

THE END