Room at the Top (27 page)

Austin looked relieved. “Yeah. Oh, that must be the flood control guys.” They both got up to answer the knock at the door.

“This staircase is a hazard,” Liam said, standing in the doorway.

“Tell me about it,” Austin said. “Imagine trying to move furniture up it.”

Jay was still stunned at seeing Liam in a place he’d never been, like he was a completely different person. He was even wearing casual cotton slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. “What are you doing here?” Jay asked.

“Yes, hello to you too,” Liam said drily. “You’re going to come stay with me. I have more than enough room, and it isn’t a request. I’ve taken the day off, and I’m here to help you pack up whatever you need.”

Austin seemed as shocked by this pronouncement as Jay felt. “I…um. I mean, yes, Sir.”

“No need for that.” Liam was gruff. “I’m here as a friend, not your dom. What can I do to help?”

Between them they managed to pack up enough clothes and other things for several days. Liam urged them to bring the bags of laundry too, but Jay noticed Austin kicked at least one bag behind the closet door in the bedroom.

He kept sneaking looks at Liam, trying to adjust to him doing normal stuff like brushing dust off his shirt from a box he’d carried from one room to another. Liam and dust just didn’t go together, like the man had a dirt-repelling force field around him or something. Liam. Here. It was the freaky sprinkles on an already strange day.

Liam’s hand closed around his wrist as he headed for the door, following Austin. Jay stopped, his body responding to being held, not in a sexual way—that was the furthest thing from his mind—but finding some comfort in the warm grip.

“I’m aware of what you lost.” Liam’s eyes were kind—not sympathetic exactly, not full of pity—but kind. “I wish I could fix that for you as easily as I can put a roof over your head, but I can’t, I’m afraid.”

“No one can.” Jay covered Liam’s hand with his, and Liam turned his hand, squeezing Jay’s fingers for a moment, then releasing him. “I’m not going to be much fun to be around for a while.”

“I’ll try to be understanding.” There was a dryness to his words, warning Jay that Liam’s patience wasn’t endless, but he found he didn’t mind that. He needed to wallow in misery, but not forever. “I don’t want to make helpful suggestions that are anything but useful, but—”

“It’s cool,” Jay said, minding his manners with an effort. He wanted to get out of here. His home with Austin had been transformed from a cozy, cluttered haven to a damp, dank, dripping mess. He couldn’t breathe without smelling rusty water and mold. He knew he was imagining the mold, but his throat was still closing up and his chest felt tight.

“Did you take photographs?”

“Huh? I mean, uh, yes. I always do. I have this scrapbook I keep with photos, notes, samples. A lot of it’s on the laptop, but I like having it in a book… Oh God, that’s gone too.” Jay glanced around wildly. “Where is it? I had it out last night. I was checking the shade I’d used for the bridge supports—”

He strode over to the kitchen table piled high with an assortment of items, all damp but not ruined, and began to search through the unstable heap. “It’s not here. Shit, where is it?”

Liam appeared beside him, reaching out to steady a stack of plates. “Calm down. Maybe Austin will remember?”

“No, he’d gone to bed and I put it…I put it….” Jay spun around. Nothing was where it should be. Everything had moved. “Fuck!”

Austin put his head around the door. “Guys? A truck just arrived, and they’re unloading the fans and stuff. They said it’d be easier if we got out of their way.”

Jay couldn’t answer him. He was having a panic attack, every breath he took doing nothing to ease the constriction in his chest, blood booming in his ears. “My book,” he managed to say. “My
book
.”

“Jay?” Austin sounded worried, but Jay couldn’t focus on him, couldn’t focus on anything because he was hyperventilating and the walls were closing in on him. “Liam, get him down before he falls down!”

In any other situation, Jay would have thought it was funny, hearing Austin order Liam around like he was the one in charge. It was funny because Liam was in charge, even now as he manhandled Jay back into the living room and onto the couch. The couch was good; it was dry and the cushions were squishy but supportive enough beneath him.

“Deep breaths,” Austin was saying. Jay’s head spun, and Austin’s and Liam’s heads looked too big, balloons floating detached above their shoulders.

“He needs his feet up,” Liam said. Jay’s feet lifted and had something stuck under them. “Jay, listen to me. I want you to take slow, deep breaths.” He was using his command voice, the one Jay knew better than to disobey even when he was freaking out.

Deep breaths. He could do that. Slowly the room steadied around him and came back into focus. Austin was kneeling on the floor next to him. “I’m okay. I need my book.”

“It’s here,” Austin assured him. “It’s on top of the fridge. I put it up there so nothing would happen to it. It’s fine.”

“Okay. Okay.” Jay blinked and looked up. Liam was gazing at him, worried face upside down and one hand, Jay realized, wrapped around the back of his neck. “That can’t be comfortable.”

“I’m not concerned about my own comfort just now,” Liam said.

Jay closed his eyes, blocking out the two people who meant the most to him, because their concern was pushing down on him and it was too heavy to bear.

“It’s just paint and wood and stuff. It doesn’t matter.”

“Anything creative is far more than the sum of its parts, but we can get philosophical later. What matters is that you’re upset and both of you are understandably stressed. I need you to open your eyes and sit up.”

When Liam gave him orders, he felt like a puppet on strings. Jay did as he was told, glancing from Austin to Liam and seeing no impatience in their eyes.

“That’s better. Now, are you sure you’ve packed anything personal or valuable?”

Austin nodded. “I’ve put the laptop in your car, and there was this box file where we keep all our paperwork. I put that in too.”

“That was Austin’s idea,” Jay said. His voice was still shaky, but it felt as if it was coming from him, not someone a foot to the left of him. “He spent a Sunday going through all the bills and insurance forms and birth certificates, and filed all of it in there.”

“Austin gets a gold star,” Liam said. “Excellent. How about anything even more personal than that? I imagine you own a few items you might prefer not to be seen by anyone walking through and getting curious? Hopefully not all in lime green or pink.”

“Oh shit, yes.” Austin headed for the bedroom, grabbing a small white plastic bag on the way. “Won’t be a sec.”

Liam raised his eyebrows. “Anything likely to shock me?”

Jay couldn’t help smiling at the idea. “
You
? No. Our landlord, yeah, definitely.”

Liam stood and went over to the fridge and retrieved Jay’s scrapbook. It was a binder, stuffed full of paper and plastic envelopes he could drop swatches or samples into. “God, this is heavy.”

Jay took it from Liam and cradled it to him. “I guess I need to start a new one.”

“Is there”—Liam hesitated—“is there time to make it again using the photographs to guide you? Now that you know what it looks like, the pitfalls to avoid?”

“In a week?” Jay shook his head. “Even if I took some time off work—and I can’t—and didn’t sleep, I don’t think I could get it to where it was. You have to let things dry and set and…” He couldn’t continue. So many nights spent in the hot, airless attic, blocking Austin out, focused on his miniature world…

He could see it in his mind if he concentrated, each detail clear and perfect. He’d been so close to finishing, a score of tiny tweaks to make, but nothing complicated, just polishing it up, really. The towers, the bridges, the ruined alien city rusting under the light of a dying sun…

Austin came back into the room, the bag hanging heavy from his hand, half-full. “All set. God, it feels weird carrying these around. If the bag breaks on the way to the car, I might just die of embarrassment.”

Jay stood abruptly, his scrapbook still clutched to his chest like a security blanket, forcing Liam to take a step to the side to let him pass. “Can we go now? Please?”

He was walking toward the door before they answered, head down, moving quickly, not looking back.

Chapter Sixteen

“That’s the last one,” Austin said, dropping the heavy bag of what had been clean clothes and was now wet, flood-soaked laundry on the floor next to Liam’s washing machine.

“No, just leave it,” Liam said as Austin leaned in to check the controls on the machine. “I’ve already called my cleaning service, and they’re sending someone in the morning to take care of it.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Austin protested. “I can do it myself—”

“I hope you aren’t telling me what to do in my own house,” Liam said mildly.

“I thought this was just friends.” Austin ignored the laundry and gave Liam his attention. “If it’s not, you have to say.”

Liam shook his head. “No, you’re right. Unless we agree to a session while you’re here, I have to remember that this is different.”

“Okay.” It was awkward—everything about this was awkward, partially because it was adding a whole new dimension to the ways in which they owed Liam. “I should, um, go check on Jay.”

“Yes. You do that. Did you two have lunch?”

It was midafternoon and they hadn’t. “We didn’t have breakfast. Things were so crazy.”

“I understand. Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll make something.”

Austin opened his mouth to say that wasn’t necessary, but remembered in time. “Okay. Thanks.”

Upstairs, the guest room had been transformed before they’d even arrived. Liam had made it look like a regular guest room that anyone could have walked into without suspecting it had ever been anything else. Jay had unpacked a few things into the adjoining bathroom but was now sitting on the bed with his diorama scrapbook opened beside him.

“Hey,” Austin said. “How are you?”

Jay gave a listless shrug. “Okay.” He nodded at his cell phone on the bed beside him. “Mr. Dalhover called. He said the attic and our floor is the worst, but Nicole’s ceilings are all going to need replacing and the carpet is so old the people who came to assess the damage advised him to get new.”

New ceilings and carpets sounded expensive. “How much is all this going to cost?”

“No worries. The insurance company pays for all of it. He said they were really nice, but he sounded upset.”

“We should go and see him.” The house had belonged to Mr. Dalhover’s family for three generations, but he’d moved out and converted it into apartments when he’d lost money on some investments. He lived with his sister, a lady who as far as Austin was concerned defined
feisty
. She’d visited them when Austin had moved in with Jay, dark eyes bright with interest as she’d peered around.

“Yeah. We can ask him why he didn’t take care of the fucking plumbing.”

The bitterness in Jay’s voice was only marginally better than the empty flatness. Austin cleared his throat. “It’s just one of those things. That tank might’ve lasted another ten years—”

“Yeah, well, it didn’t. It cracked and the water came out.” There was a short, awkward silence. Jay broke it, adding, “They’re going to need to put everything into storage for when they bring the ceiling down. They’re taking care of that too. They pack it, take it away, dry it out or restore it. Most of the furniture is his, and all the pots and pans and shit like that, so it’s not like we have any say in it, but he told us to go back tomorrow and grab the rest of our stuff.”

Austin began to go over it all in his head. Books, magazines…most of those were pulped, sadly. The rest of their clothes, their DVDs, Jay’s diorama supplies. He kept thinking of random items, like the food in the fridge, their potted plants.

Overwhelmed, he sat down heavily on the bed. “It’s a nightmare.”

“No.” Jay’s voice was wound tight, ready to snap. “It’s real. It’s happening.” He put his hand on his book as if he wanted to reassure himself it was still there. “I think I’m going to lie down for a bit. Take a nap.”

“Oh. Do you want company?”

Jay shook his head and lay back, rolling to his side, turned away from Austin.

Austin sat down next to him, moving the scrapbook so nothing would happen to it. It would be just his luck to wreck the thing less than twenty-four hours after it survived a flood. He put a hand on Jay’s shoulder. Jay didn’t respond, and Austin sighed and lay down behind him. “Hey,” he said gently. “Sweetheart.” He didn’t use terms of endearment often, but right then he definitely meant it. “It’s going to be okay.”

“Yeah. The house will get fixed, we’ll move back in, you’ll have fun putting everything away nice and neat and tidy, and there’ll be another competition next year. It’s all going to be just fucking
fine
. I
get it
.” Jay turned his head and glared at him, the hostility in his eyes like a slap. “Jesus, Austin, stop being so goddamned
chirpy
. And stop pretending you care about my diorama because you don’t. You hate how long I spend working on them, and you think they’re fucking pointless and a waste of time and money.”

Stung beyond words, Austin got off the bed and stood beside it. His gaze fell on Jay’s scrapbook, and he considered, for a second or two, throwing it across the room just for the satisfaction of hearing the spine crack. But he knew he’d regret it as soon as it left his grip, so instead he kicked the leg of the bed. “I know you’re upset, and you have a right to be, but none of this is my fault. It’s time for you to fucking
grow up
and stop taking it out on me.”

Austin turned and strode from the room before he could do anything he might regret, heading for the kitchen where he could hear the sounds of Liam preparing a meal he doubted he’d be able to swallow a single bite of past the lump in his throat. “Do you have anything to drink?” he asked as soon as he reached the threshold.

“Excuse me?” Liam said, turning. He was holding a spatula, and the image of him wearing a frilly apron flashed through Austin’s mind.