Loving Bailey (3 page)

Ending the phone call with the swipe of his
thumb, Ashton held up a hand to ward off Arlo's comments. "Save it.
I've heard all of this before."

"How long has he been pestering you?" Concern
laced his old friend's voice.

Wearily, Ashton drew circles in the
condensation rings on the table. "Since his divorce went through a
few months ago." He paused for a moment. "Do you think I'm doing
the same thing to Bailey?"

"What? Stalking him?"

"No. Abusing the power dynamic to keep him in
a relationship that isn't appropriate? He's so young. His life is
just beginning."

"Absolutely not. You're nothing like that
creep and your relationship with Bailey is hardly the same. There
is no power dynamic. He's not your student, you're not his boss.
And he's not that young from what you've told me."

"Twenty-one." Ashton glanced moodily around
the bar. Pete's At the Beach wasn't the right type of bar to go to.
Not if you just wanted to get shit-faced and forget that your
boyfriend lied to you. Most nights it was more of a family sort of
place, where established couples came to have a margarita or a Mai
Tai after a day spent in the sun. This close to the beach it caught
a fair share of the young singles crowd looking to hook up, too,
but when all you needed was a steady flow of alcohol and a
sympathetic ear, it lacked something. Drinks were stupidly
expensive, the décor commercially trendy pseudo-tropical. He and
Arlo Johansson sat on crazily uncomfortable woven barstools that
Arlo claimed were Polynesian influenced and therefore did not fit
in with the rest of the décor.

All Ashton knew was that the plastic fake
straw shit poked through his khaki shorts and the back positively
abraded his skin through the thin polo shirt he wore whenever he
forgot himself so much as to lean against it.

So what was he doing here in this den of high
priced mediocrity drinking whisky like water and attempting to
drown his sorrow and ire? Arlo could take the blame for that
too.

Answering his cell phone in the car as he
left Bailey's birthday slash graduation party, he'd been in enough
of a foul mood to agree to meet his old college roommate.

Arlo lived on a boat that docked at the
marina near the bar, which made meeting at Pete's convenient for
him. Ashton didn't care, but the idea of a drink and some
conversation to distract himself from brooding over Bailey's
behavior sounded good.

"Should have gone home and graded papers," he
muttered, interrupting Arlo's story about an incredible find in
Aruba where he'd apparently spent the last six months working on a
friend's prehistoric dig. That stack of blue books still sat on the
floor between his sofa and the lamp. Instead, he'd spent last night
making out and laughing and planning a future with the man he
loved.

"After uncovering the sixth body, we've
determined the site must be a graveyard…" Arlo droned on,
apparently unaware that Ashton wasn't following his conversation at
all.

No, he couldn't tear his thoughts away from
the man he'd loved, trusted with his whole heart. Stupidly, it
turned out. Bailey was no more worthy of his trust than any of his
previous lovers had proven. Oh, he wasn't a cheater or a player
like some of them had turned out to be. Like Arlo played the field…
He could forgive that.

But once before he'd been someone's secret.
Only Dennis had been hiding him from their boss and his wife, not
his father. Ashton wasn't quite sure what was worse. Nor did he
understand the point of it. He didn't hide his sexuality on campus
or off it, he never had. And neither had Bailey. He remembered his
first meeting with the broken-hearted youth on campus. Bailey had
been hidden behind a palm tree on the upper floor of the library,
sobbing softly. Tremors shook the broad shoulders, and while he'd
been tempted to flee, his predicament had touched Ashton. He'd
taken a chance on the burly youth accepting comfort and placed a
hand on his shoulder. The heat that flared between them astonished
them both.

He'd coaxed Bailey's story from him over a
cup of coffee in his office and couldn't hide his pleasure when the
younger man came back again and again to talk. Talk. All that
talking and he couldn't talk to his own father about Ashton?

"It's not like he doesn't
know
his son
is gay." He slammed his glass down on the counter and waved the
bartender over.

A warm hand landed on his thigh, squeezed
comfortingly. Evidently for all his determined talk of ancient
ruins and mummified bodies, Arlo was listening. "Yeah, but you said
he was insecure, that he'd had a bad experience." Arlo Johansson
was doing his best to cheer Ashton up, but he wasn't
succeeding.

"For Christ sake, it wasn't with his dad. The
man is bisexual!" Ashton's voice rose, attracting curious glances
and a censorious frown from a table with small children. He stared
down the parents for a moment before turning back to Arlo and
speaking in a softer voice. "He has a male lover who lives in the
house with them."

"But he's young and gun-shy, and is it really
so wrong what he did?" Arlo scanned the crowd, and Ashton saw him
do a double take and study one face more carefully.

Ashton glared at his friend, a professor of
marine archeology at UCLA. "Whose side are you on?" The bald
bartender brought over a bottle of whisky and waved it over
Ashton's glass. He nodded curtly and watched the whisky level rise.
When the bartender stopped, he snorted impatiently. The bartender
poured more, stopping just short of the rim. Ashton laid a twenty
on the bar and picked up the glass. Spinning his barstool back to
face the crowd made him dizzy, and he clutched at Arlo's shoulder
for support. Maybe he had had a touch too much to drink. No matter.
He swallowed a large mouthful, cursing as the liquor burned on the
way down. Turning back to Arlo, he found the man still staring
across the room.

The bar was a popular place, situated
practically on the beach, and played host to a variety of
clientele, from college students to the young working crowd. Pete's
was a hot place to be on a Saturday night. The white blond hair and
thin face of the man who'd caught Arlo's interest rang a bell for
Ashton. "Hey, now. He's bad news. Stay away from that one if you
know what's good for you." He picked up his glass and swallowed the
last of the whisky in it. Bartender was slow as fuck tonight, but
he supposed that was because of the crowd.

"You know him?" The interest in Arlo's voice
was unmistakable.

"He's the fucker who messed up Bailey."

A smooth sun bleached brow rose. "That is the
boy who lives with Bailey's father? Does his lover know how he
spends his nights?" Ashton frowned at the man across the room. He
was scantily clad, his skin seemed to glow from the sun. Sleepy
lids half hid Sylvan's pale blue eyes, and his mouth was a smudge
of pink in the distance. One earnest suitor had a hand on his
shoulder, another man bent over the back of his chair. Sylvan
Griswald was having a fine time if the laughter and loud voices
were anything by which to judge.

"No. Eden St. Cyr was the boy he had a crush
on. He tried to be nice to Bailey, from the way Bailey tells it,
but he wasn't into him and he was just thoughtless. Did things like
forget his name. No, that one is Sylvan. He was outright
nasty."

"He's quite pretty. I think almost pretty
enough to make up for the personality."

The sound Ashton made could only be described
as a snort. "I'd like to make his outside match his inside. Then
people might not worship him so blatantly."

"Don't you think you've had enough of that?"
Arlo demanded. "Come on. Let's take these drinks out to the patio
and watch the sun set." Without waiting for an answer, the
sun-burned archeologist scooped up both their glasses and began
forging a path through the crowd to the patio.

The cool breeze sobered Ashton a bit, and he
regretted his outburst of complaints as he seated himself on a
bench at a picnic table. "I'm sorry, Arlo. Bailey is a good guy, a
little shy, a little insecure. I know he'll talk to his dad and get
things squared away. It's just that with Dennis…" He paused to sip
more of his whisky. "Maybe Bailey isn't the only one who's
gun-shy."

"Different cases entirely, my friend. Now.
Are we going to get drunk and wallow in misery all night, or shall
we get drunk and catch up on our lives?"

"Bailey is my life," he confessed softly. "I
don't know what I'll do if his dad talks him out of moving in with
me, or… God. I don't even want to imagine what could happen. I've
been waiting eighteen months to make him mine, Arlo."

"That's a long time, my friend. What does he
say, Bailey? Does he feel the same way you do?"

"He says he loves me. Sometimes I think he
does, and sometimes I remember what I was like at twenty-one. I was
horny as hell and fell in love with every hot ass that walked
past." He stared at the brilliant colors of the setting sun, afraid
to look his friend in the face in light of that confession, one he
hadn't even acknowledged to himself yet.

"You're afraid he'll be unfaithful?"

"I know. I'm a fucking mess. I'm afraid all
he wants me for is sex, and at the same time, I'm afraid that sex
won't be enough. Hell, part of me even wants to tell him that he's
too young to tie himself down with me. I'm thirty-six."

Arlo stood abruptly. He stared down at Ashton
with glittering pale blue eyes. Why had they ever fallen out of
love? Out of lust, he corrected himself. Oh yeah. The faithfully
ever after thing. And graduate school on the east coast. "Why'd you
have to go to Yale?"

Arlo smiled gently. "Oh, it's all my fault,
now, is it?" He tugged Ashton from the picnic table bench and onto
his feet. "Let's blow this joint. The local man-whore drama is more
than my celibate self can take. We'll pick up something at the
corner store and finish getting drunk on my boat."

"Man-whore? We've never even slept together…"
He followed Arlo's meaningful glance to where the white-blond
Sylvan sat smiling with evident amusement while the two men who'd
been touching him earlier appeared to be squaring off. "Oh."

"Oh, indeed, my love. Not everything, sad to
say, is about you. But I've no wish to be arrested in a bar brawl
my first night back in the country."

Chapter Four

"I wasn't intentionally hiding his age from
you, Dad." Bailey stared into his father's angry eyes. "I didn't
even think of it as hiding him from you, more as keeping him to
myself." Of all the things he'd thought his father might say, an
objection to his relationship based on Ashton's age hadn't been at
the top of his list.

"He's fifteen years older than you are!"

"Eden is twenty years younger than you are,"
he returned smoothly. Knowing his father was a reasonable man and
would see the light didn't make this conversation any easier.

"Eden was an adult when we met."

Heat crept up his neck and Bailey tried to
count in his head to control his own rising ire. "I was an adult
when I met Ashton. I was nineteen as a matter of fact."

"It's different." His father slashed a hand
down emphatically, as though making his point clear. Bailey pressed
back into the sofa as his father crossed the room in front of him
again.

Steam practically exuded from his ears, he
was so upset. "Dad, it's the same. At least, if you're objecting on
the basis of age."

"I have been nineteen, Bailey. I was
nineteen when I met your mother and she was pregnant with our first
child." He clasped his hands in front of his face and gazed
earnestly at Bailey. "That's not what I want for you, for any of my
sons. That trapped feeling."

"Jesus, Dad! I love Ashton. And if things go
wrong, seriously, it's not like he's going to get pregnant and
we'll be tied together in a life of misery in order to raise
children." He regretted the irritated outburst as soon as his
father's face froze.

Drew plunked down on the sofa next to Bailey
and buried his face in his hands. "I never felt that way. I've
always felt that you and your brother were worth it. I didn't mean
to give you that impression."

"Dad, come on." He felt awkward and unsure
of what to say. How did this end up with him comforting his dad? "I
didn't mean that you did. I just meant that things between me and
Ashton aren't the same as they were with you and Mom. We love each
other. We're not going to be together because social values and
mores"—damn sociology class was coming in handy; he almost sounded
like he knew what the fuck he was talking about—"dictate that we do
the right thing. We're going to be together because it's what we
both want."

"What if this relationship doesn't last,
Bailey? First love often doesn't last."

Smiling wryly, Bailey slung an arm over his
father's shoulders. "You're telling me? If you recall, Ashton is
not my first love."

"I don't want you hurt like that again,
Bailey. And to be honest, the age thing isn't even what bothers me.
He's a teacher at the school where you take classes."

"Was," Bailey corrected gently. "I was a
student at the school where he used to teach."

"Semantics. The dynamic of power in the
relationship is wrong. You were in his care, under his authority.
He had no business being with you. There're probably all kinds of
codes and bylaws against it."

He shook his head, determined to disabuse
his father on this point. "No, there aren't. I checked. While the
college doesn't encourage relationships between students and
teachers, they can't legally prevent them, unless the student is in
the professor's class. I never took a class from Ashton. He's never
been my advisor. There is no student-teacher relationship between
us."

"I just can't get around the fact that he
had to have taken advantage of you."