Bankers' Hours (33 page)

“What are you going to do with that thing?” Tristan asked.

I considered the unhappy snake in my hands. “First I’m going to rinse the wound in the sink, and then I guess I’ll let it go.”

Tristan stepped back. “Not in my house!”

“Okay, fine. I’ll rinse it with the hose. Then I’ll walk it down the street and let it go in the woods over there.” I motioned with my head in my intended direction.

“Okay,” Tristan agreed. “I guess that isn’t too close.”

Tristan’s reaction was kind of adorable, and when he related his phobia toward snakes to mine over spiders, that helped me to understand it. Everyone had something they were afraid of, and even a big tough guy like Tristan wasn’t impervious to everything. Now I knew his weakness. After tending to the snake, I let it go and helped Tristan clean the blood off his hand. I smeared Neosporin on it and covered the worst bite holes with a bandage.

Of course he also insisted that another part of his body needed attention in order to soothe his frazzled nerves, and even though I laughed, I did make sure all of him was comfortably content before I resumed sorting his financial statements.

IN THE
wee hours of Saturday night, after dinner, showers and making love, we lay quietly together, cuddling. Tristan ran his hand up and down my back while I drew lazy circles in his chest hair. The bathroom light was on so we could see, but it wasn’t glaring like his bedside lamp normally did. I had told him I liked making love with the light on because the expression on his face, as he moved in and out of me, was orgasmic. He’d chuckled, and ever since, the light was on every time.

“Tristan, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” he said, stroking my face and running his fingers through my hair.

“Who do you think put the snake in your mailbox?”

“I don’t know. Punk kids? I did some pretty stupid things as a pubescent teenager. I remember my brother driving around with his punk friends, bashing mailboxes with a baseball bat. Kids do stupid things.”

“I never did. I remember shoveling snow for my elderly neighbors and refusing to take payment in anything other than hot chocolate.”

There was a grin to his voice. “That doesn’t surprise me.” His heartbeat was strong and steady under my hand.

“Aside from possible hoodlums, do you have any enemies? Or people who know you don’t like snakes?”

He admitted, “Everyone knows I hate snakes.”

“But is there someone who is sick enough to injure a snake in order to make it angrier?”

He sighed. “I don’t think I want to know.”

I lifted my head off his shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “Then you
can
think of someone.” The expression on his face was tired, like he knew but didn’t want to know.

“Maybe Teresa. She called me this week. She said my lawyer sent papers to her house. She’s pissed about having to find someone to represent her.”

I scooted up his body a smidgen in order to satisfy a strong urge to kiss his neck. “Didn’t she have a lawyer before?” I rubbed his skin with my nose and planted kisses from his collarbone up to his ear.

He sighed heavily with a slight groan, but most likely from my kisses and not from the topic of discussion. “No. We’ve never used a lawyer. Every agreement we’ve had up to now has been verbal. The years rolled by, and everything has remained the same. Until I met you.”

“Me?” I questioned, bringing my head up from his neck to look him in the eyes again.

He tilted his head to give me a kiss and then said, “Yes, you. Meeting you helped me see all the things I wanted in life but didn’t have.”

“Aww,” I gushed, nuzzling his cheek and kissing him some more.

“I guess it could have been Teresa, but that’s stooping pretty low.”

I curled my arms around his head and caressed his stubble as I nibbled on his earlobe. It disturbed me that his ex would do something so mean, but at least it was a plausible explanation if punk kids weren’t to blame.

Tristan groaned and gripped my back. “Baby, if you keep doing that, I’m going to want inside your ass again.”

I snickered. Pondering the snake in the mailbox had run its course. My libido, however, had not been satisfied enough to find sleep. Plus, I figured, the more we did it, the less my ass would hurt each time. Right? The muscles had to adjust to him eventually. “What if that’s my goal?” I asked before I bit him.

Tristan pinned me to the bed in one swift flip, shoving my legs apart with his knee. “You little minx,” he said, kissing me soundly. “If more is what you want, then more is what you’ll get.”

SUNDAY NIGHT,
after basically a repeat of Saturday, I listened to Tristan breathing quietly as he slept. He had worked hard cleaning out what I almost considered
our
bedroom now, and had loaded all the remaining trash from another bedroom upstairs into his truck to take to the dump on Monday. Only the stupid ship prints remained, but he promised to take them down once we picked out paint. As we cleaned the house, I came to suspect it had been just like everything else in his life. The junk just piled up over the years, and he hadn’t found enough motivation to get rid of it. Apparently I was his motivation for everything.

I squeezed the arm that held me around the middle. I
did
love him. It hadn’t taken as long as I had thought it would to realize it, and probably less time than it took other people, but in the five weeks I’d known Tristan, I couldn’t deny this was the happiest I’d been in my life.

Tristan’s mouth was by my ear, and I could feel his nose in my hair, nuzzling me every now and then as if even in sleep he was aware of my presence. I wanted to roll over and kiss his neck. I had come to long for the taste of his skin, so much so I dreaded work in the morning. Being away from him for hours at a time was torture.

I reached over and picked up my phone. 11:57 p.m. I hated when I couldn’t sleep and ended up staring obsessively at the clock all night. It started ringing just as I set it back down. I jumped, grabbing for it frantically as if turning the ringer off would stop Tristan from waking up. I pushed every button, using both hands in my panic, and when it was silent, I turned to Tristan.

“I’m sorry. I forgot to put it on silent.”

He groaned and rolled over, pulling the blanket up.

I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or simply trying to go back to sleep as soon as possible, since he had to work in seven hours. We’d only just turned the lights out an hour ago. I pressed the button on my phone to see who had called, but the fraction of the ringtone I’d heard already had given me a hunch.

Missed call: Mel Tersiguel

Curious.
Mel never calls me this late.

I slipped quietly out of bed and went into the living room to call him back.

“Grant?” Mel asked, voice shaking over the phone.

“Yeah. What’s wrong? You never call this late.” I sat on the loveseat.

“I broke up with Cindy,” he sobbed.

“Oh, no. Why?” I had a suspicion why, but I needed to hear it from Mel. My eyes dropped to the carpet I hated, and I pulled my feet up onto the cushion.

“We were on our second date. I thought it was going really well, because while we were sitting on the couch drinking wine, she kissed me.”

“Okay. Then how…?”

“I took a deep breath and told her I had something serious to explain to her before anything went further. She said okay. So when I told her I was a transgender man, she got this funny look on her face and asked what I was talking about. I was confused for a second, and that’s when she said she thought I was a butch lesbian.”

“Oh, no,” I muttered. I knew how much it hurt for him to hear those words.

“I calmly told her no, I identify as a man, so I’m undergoing a physical transition to reflect what’s on the inside. After which, she said how surgery was unnecessary because she was bisexual and didn’t care which parts I had. And then I told her how I felt, right before asking her to leave.” Mel sobbed on the other end. “She slammed the door on her way out, and now I feel like I’m going to die.”

A quiver ran through me. I hated the sound of his voice—he was never like this. His sobs reached through the phone and clamped around my throat until I was leaping off the loveseat and bolting for the door. I snagged my keys out of the little dish on the table by the door on the way out. “I’m coming. I’ll be there as fast as I can. You’ll be okay,” I assured him as I ran to my car in my bare feet. I jumped in, started the car, and was on the road before I realized I was still in my underwear.

Oh, well. Mel needs me,
I thought.

“Just keep talking, or don’t, whatever you need. I’m listening. I won’t hang up on you. If the line goes dead it’s because I lost signal, so hang your phone up and I’ll call you right back. I promise.”

WE SAT
up all night, talking some but mostly hugging. Mel was wrecked. He really liked Cindy, but it was the vulnerability of dating for the first time in years and its subsequent failure that had crushed Mel’s spirit. Cindy was gone, and I wasn’t sure he’d be able to pull himself back together. I worried for him. I think it was the first time I understood the term “heartbroken.”

IN THE
morning, I borrowed his clothes to wear to work. I was running late, and stopping at my house first would take another half hour to forty minutes to stop, change, and leave again. It was simply easier to use his clothes. My eyes burned from crying with Mel, my head pounded from lack of sleep, and my back ached from lying on a couch that wasn’t made for human comfort. I made it to the bank on time, but Jessica noticed how bad I looked.

“Jeez, you look like shit. What happened? Did you and Tristan have a fight or something?” she asked, leaning closer to me up against her side of the cubicle wall. At least she was trying to be private with her inquiry.

I leaned in from the other side. “No. We’re fine. It was my best friend. His girlfriend broke up with him, and he was a mess last night. I drove over to console him. Neither of us slept.”

“Looks like it. And what’s with the shirt? I’ve never seen you wear a polo shirt. Not that it’s bad or anything, you look nice, but it’s different.”

“It’s Mel’s. I drove over in my underwear because I wasn’t thinking, and wearing his stuff saved time this morning. His pants are too short, so don’t laugh when you can see my socks.”

She grinned. “Okay. You’re a really great friend if you dropped everything to help him.” She walked around the side of the cubicle and gave me a hug. “I wish I had friends like that.”

I gazed into her pretty blue eyes and smiled warmly, genuinely feeling that tug of friendship wrapping around my heart as it had when I’d met Mel that first day. “You do. I’ll be your friend,” I declared.

She hugged me again, but two customers walked through the door and our sentimental moment was disrupted. I didn’t mind, because for the first time in weeks, I felt like I belonged there. This bank was my home.

I sighed, waved the customer up to my window, and asked, “How may I help you today?”

SOMETIME IN
the afternoon, Tristan walked through the door with a wad of something in his hand. He stood in line and kept his gaze down. When Jessica was free at the same time as me, he chose her window. I eyed him curiously, but I had a customer of my own to worry about twenty seconds after Tristan handed the money to Jessica. I kept glancing over, and just before he left, he glared at me. Hard. Bone-chilling. I shrank back and gasped, even though he was several feet away on the other side of the counter and couldn’t possibly do anything to me.

“Could I have ten ones for this?” my customer asked, handing me back a ten.

I cleared my throat. “Of course.”

During the next lull, Jessica came over to me and whispered, “What was up with Tristan? He looked like he was about to kill you. I thought you said you weren’t fighting last night. What was his death stare about?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I thought we were fine. Sex last night was mind-blowing—if anything, he should have been winking or licking his teeth at me.” A blush touched her cheeks. I apologized, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to say that. It just came out.”

Jessica shrugged but still didn’t bring her eyes up to meet mine. “It’s okay. You’re the only gay friend I have, so hearing you say things like that is somewhat shocking, but kind of cute. I’m glad your spontaneous marriage is working out.”

“Thanks. I think it’s going good. I mean… there are some adjustments we have to make. Tristan’s house is not what I would consider optimal living conditions, and obviously something’s up with him today, but we’re working on it.”

She glanced over my shoulder. “Gotta go. Customer.”

“Okay. We should pick a day we’re both off and go have lunch or something,” I suggested.

Her smile could have lit up the room. “I’d love that.”

I grinned back, but I had a customer of my own so the rest of what could have been a great conversation had to wait for another time.
Whatever.
I felt pretty good about our friendship.

I THOUGHT
about going straight home, but as I neared the shop I reconsidered. I hadn’t talked to Tristan all day, and it felt strange. No texts. No messages. Not even a smile from him at the bank. I pulled in and parked in front of the office door.

The bell on the door sounded when I entered, and Wes stood up on the other side of the desk. “Hey, Grant,” he greeted me, but with less enthusiasm than previously. He walked over to the counter and stuck out his hand. I shook it. “Is everything okay with you and Tristan? He’s been seriously off today. He even threw a wrench across the floor when the bolt he was removing wouldn’t budge.”

Tristan was “off” here
and
at the bank? A cold shiver of dread ran down my back. I stuttered, “Um, I-I don’t know. Maybe he’s mad about something and h-hasn’t told me.” If he was throwing things at work, maybe I didn’t want to know.