When Tony Met Adam (Short Story) (6 page)

He hadn’t been touched with such tenderness since he was a child. Since his mother had tucked him in at night. And even then,
those
memories were tarnished by his ability to conjure a very sharp picture of her face, distorted and mottled with anger, as she drove him from the house where he’d lived for his entire sixteen years.
No son of mine …
And
You’re dead to me! Dead!
All because he was honest when his sister found the gay porn magazines he’d hidden—badly, apparently—in his bedroom. He could’ve claimed ignorance, pretended that they were a horrible practical joke perpetuated upon him by the bullies at the high school.

Instead, he’d told her the truth—that he thought he was gay.

She spent the next week trying to talk him out of it, trying to convince him that he was wrong. It was just a phase. A reaction to being unpopular at school. She took him to the doctor. She took him to church. She prayed and she wept, and finally he snapped and admitted that he didn’t really
think
he was gay—he knew it. His good friend Carlos from summer camp wasn’t just his friend, he was Adam’s lover. They’d started having sex when Adam was fourteen and …

Adam had found himself out in the street, locked out of his house, with nowhere to go. Carlos was already in college and unable—unwilling, really—to help him. He had a new boyfriend, and finals were approaching. Besides, guests couldn’t stay overnight in his dorm, so …

Yeah.

Adam had had to grow up fast, although lately, when he thought about his years on the street, during his latest monk-like musings, he was starting to realize that maybe he hadn’t grown up at all. Maybe he’d merely—barely—survived. Although Jules’s opinion on the subject, which he’d expounded upon liberally in those last few days when Adam finally moved out of the apartment they’d shared in D.C., was that Adam
hadn’t
survived. He was broken. Jules believed that Adam had been damaged, irreparably, by his family’s rejection and the desperate years that had followed.

Of course, Jules had been mad as hell that Adam had not only hooked up with another man, but had spent nearly two weeks with him in Jules’s apartment, while Jules was out of the country.

It was, undeniably, a bastard-asshole thing to do. Which was, in part, why Adam had done it. The mere slips of the past hadn’t made Jules kick him out. His transgression had had to be major.

And it had worked. He could still remember the expression of total evisceration on Jules’s face.

And okay. He was wrong about the whole no-one-had-touched-him-like-that-since-he-was-a-child thing.
Jules
had touched him like that, too—with genuine love and tenderness.

But Adam hadn’t been able to accept such a gift at that time in his life. And, to be fair to his broken, dysfunctional self, Jules’s affection
hadn’t
been unconditional. He’d wanted something that Adam couldn’t give him. He’d wanted love that was combined with fidelity and honesty and commitment. At the time, all those years ago, Adam didn’t even know what those things were—not after spending so many years trading both body and soul for the fleeting security of a meal and a roof over his head. Sex was his currency, his power, his source of both immediate gratification and imminent self-loathing, and love only made it complicated, adding jealousy and fear, anger and mistrust into the mix.

Which brought him back to Tony, who’d clearly seen that picture taken at Big’s and decided—rightfully—that Adam wasn’t worth his time.

It was for the best.

But now, this morning, as he was skimming a news article about the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, he came upon a phrase that made him flash both hot and cold as the hair on the back of his neck stood up.

 … 
similar to last month’s attack, in which two Navy SEALs were killed and three others were wounded
.

No. Please, God, no …

He googled Tony’s name with his heart in his throat, and the first things that came up looked like some kind of qualifying lists for charity runs. Adam clicked a link, and yes, apparently Tony ran half-marathons—thirteen-point-one miles, holy shit—in his spare time.

He’d also—according to his hometown paper, the
Shoreline Times
—graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College. A picture showed a younger and significantly more slender Tony—his middle name was Michael—grinning broadly at the camera, with light and life dancing in his pretty eyes. There was a picture of him, as well, with much shorter hair, dressed in his Navy uniform, with an announcement about his acceptance into the SEAL’s BUD/S training, another announcing his graduation from the grueling program and his acceptance into Team Sixteen.

And Adam didn’t know much about the Navy—other than that the uniforms could make damn near anyone look hot. But he
did
know that the average Ivy League college student didn’t
enlist
in the Navy upon graduation. It was bizarre. Maybe—
maybe
—they became an officer, but to just sign up as a grunt …?

Who did that?

Tony, apparently.

Adam back-paged to his original Google list, scanned down it, and …

Oh, sweet Jesus, there was an obituary. For Anthony Michael Vlachic, again from the
Shoreline Times
, and he clicked it with dread churning his stomach, praying that Tony had a grandfather or father with the exact same name, but the link took him to a page that was blank.

“No,” he said. What the fuck …?

But then a message appeared:
Please excuse our construction dust. The page you requested is temporarily off-line as we update our website
.

“Shit!” He reached for his phone, flipping through his address book, because there was only one person to call at a time like this.

Jules, with his FBI agent status, would be able to find out what Adam needed to know.

Except the last time he and Jules had collided, the FBI agent’s good friends, Cowboy Sam and Wonder-Woman Alyssa, had deleted both Jules’s and Robin’s phone numbers from Adam’s phone. And he hadn’t inputted them again—at least not yet.

Except now, when Adam went into his computer contact file, he couldn’t find Jules. Or Robin, for that matter. Which was beyond strange, since he
knew
he’d had a record of both their work and cell numbers, along with their home landline up in Boston.

But their page had vanished—or rather, it had been erased.

Perhaps even by Tony, when he’d spent the night at Adam’s. Sure Adam was a light sleeper, but Tony was a freaking SEAL, trained at moving stealthily. He could’ve gotten out of bed in the night, gone into the living room where Adam’s laptop was sitting in plain sight …

Or maybe Tony had had nothing to do with it. Maybe Sam had made a discreet phone call, even before Adam had left Boston back in December, and one of his spooky friends had slid in through the crack under the door and done the dirty work for him.

Sam was a real son of a bitch. But he was also a son of a bitch who knew Tony and was still tight with the SEALs in Team Sixteen, and therefore a great source of information.

Adam googled
Troubleshooters Incorporated, San Diego
, and followed the link to the security team’s website, where there was plenty of contact information. He punched the main phone number into his phone and …

It was picked up after only one ring by a woman. “Troubleshooters. This is Tracy Shapiro speaking. How can I help you?”

“I need to speak to Sam Starrett,” Adam said.

“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting with a client,” Tracy said crisply. “I’ll connect you to his line so you can leave a voice mail.”

“Wait,” Adam said, but she was so efficient, she’d already switched him over.

“This is Sam Starrett,” came the recorded message in Sam’s standard cowboy twang. “Leave a message and I’ll get back to you ASAP.” Adam hung up before the beep and reached for his cell phone, just in case the receptionist had caller ID, which she probably did, because come on. This was a personal security firm, after all.

He dialed Troubleshooter’s number again, and this time, when she picked up, he did his best imitation of Jules.

“Troubleshooters. This is—”

He cut her off, pitched his voice further back in his chest and added the almost musical inflections that made people respond as if Jules were telling the most fascinating story in the world. “Hey, Trace. It’s me, Jules Cassidy. I’m in a teensy bit of a bind.” He brought
teensy
up an octave and let
bit of a bind
drop back even lower than his normal register. Damn. He did Jules better than Jules himself. “I’m calling from a borrowed cell phone and, well, it’s a long story. Too long to tell right now. It’s something of an emergency, though, and I really need to speak to Sam. Is he around?”

“I’ll put you right through, sir,” she said.

Sam picked up close to immediately. “Hey,” he said. “Hang on just a sec, while I go into my office and …” There was a
thunk
while he must’ve closed his door. “What’s going on, Cassidy? Are you all right? Is Robin—”

“He’s fine,” Adam said in his own voice. “And Jules is, too. At least as far as I know. I just … I’m sorry, but I needed to talk to you and …”

“Who the fuck is this …?” Sam asked in a growl that was scary even with miles between them.

“It’s Adam,” he said. “And I
am
sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I thought—”

“Adam
Wyndham …
?” Sam asked with the same inflection that someone might say
You puked in my
car …?

“Look, I haven’t heard from Tony in a really long time,” Adam tried to explain, “and then I read that there’d been casualties over in Afghanistan—”

“It’s a war,” Sam said flatly. “There are casualties every fucking day. You’re really a piece of work, you know that, Wyndham? And I know you’re not an idiot, so you
must
know it’s illegal to impersonate a federal agent—”

“So arrest me,” Adam said. “I don’t give a shit. I just need to—” His voice actually broke, and he had to blink back the tears that sprang into his eyes. “I’m going crazy over here, Sam,” he whispered. “Please. Have mercy on me. I need to know. Was Tony one of the SEALs who died?”

“What?” Sam said. “Died? No one in the teams
died
.”

Was it possible that he didn’t know? “The article said it happened last month,” Adam said, reaching for his computer mouse and searching for the link to the news story that he’d read and …

“There
was
an ambush,” Sam told him, “back about a month ago, with one hell of a firefight. Tony was hit, but he’s not dead.”

Tony was not dead. Oh, God, thank you, God … And Jesus, he was a moron. The article he’d been reading was from 2005. Except Sam had just told him—holy crap! “Tony was hit?” Adam asked. “What do you mean hit? You mean
shot?”

“It was no big deal,” Sam reassured him, which was stupid, because Adam knew being shot was a big deal. Jules had been shot, and it had scared the shit out of Adam, just thinking about how dead Jules would have been had that bullet hit him a fraction of an inch lower.

“At least not when it happened,” Sam was still talking and Adam focused. “But apparently the wound got infected and … It was bad for a while there.”

“Oh, my God,” Adam said. “Define
bad.”

“Bad enough to need a hospital. And since Lopez couldn’t get Tony to one, not until the CIC had the troops he needed to stage a counteroffensive to draw al Qaeda away from where they had the SEALs pinned in the mountains, well … Lopez brought the hospital to Tony. He and Izzy Zanella jumped in with the antibiotics and medical supplies the team needed, to hold out until the reinforcements arrived.”

“Jumped?” Adam asked.

The word meant just what he’d suspected. “Parachuted,” Sam explained. “Which is a fucking crazy
don’t try this at home, kids
stunt, at this time of year, in those mountains, with those what-the-fuck air currents …?” He
sounded both envious and impressed, former SEAL that he was. “You know, I wouldn’t be able to tell you any of this, but the story is about to break in the news—with no names, of course. Still, the public loves a SEAL rescue, and this was too good not to leak. Cosmo, Silverman, and Dan Gillman led the enemy on a wild goat chase down the mountain, creating a diversion by pretending they were carrying Tony out of there. Meanwhile, Tony was hunkered down with Jenkins, waiting for Lopez and Zanella to come surfing in with their medical special delivery.”

Sweet Jesus. “Are they all okay?”

“Mostly,” Sam said. “Silverman broke an ankle—disembarking from the extraction helo, after they finally got everyone out of there.”

“And Tony?” Adam asked. “He’s all right?”

“He was in the hospital, in Germany, for a while,” Sam told him. “But yeah. He’s gonna be fine.”

Thank God.

“He’s also home now,” Sam continued. “They all are, the whole team. They got back about a week ago, I think. And Adam?” he added, not unkindly. “I kind of suspect that if Tony wanted you around, he would’ve called you by now, you know?”

Ouch.

“Yeah,” Adam said. He
did
know. But it was okay, because Tony wasn’t dead.

“Do the kid a favor,” Sam started.

Adam cut him off. “Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. Don’t worry, I’m not going to call him.” He just didn’t want him to be dead.

“I gotta go,” Sam said. “I’m supposed to be in a meeting. I need to get back to it.”

“Yeah,” Adam said again. “I’m sorry that I—I
am
sorry. And … thank you.”

“Don’t do it again.” Sam hung up.

Adam sat there, at his computer, for a good long time, just staring out the window, glad beyond belief that Tony was all right, and yet filled with an almost overpowering sadness that made him want to weep.

But he didn’t. Because life was unfair. He’d learned that years ago.

And even if life weren’t unfair, if he had a choice between Tony not being dead, and Tony calling him again?

Adam would choose the option he’d gotten. No doubt about it. And no fucking way was he going to cry over something that he knew in his heart was a giant win.