(FIC) On The Road Again (1/3)
My stomach twists uncomfortably. I’ve had the first real shower in I-can’t-remember-when back at the rec center before changing into this disguise-if you can even call it that-and now I’m with my family, and they’re pushing food on me, and I ought to be able to be happy, but I’m not.
“You really have to leave so soon?” Teddy asks, voice low.
“It’s not exactly safe for my friends to come inside. You can sneak me in, but not all of us… And I can’t stay here while they crouch out in that alleyway ten feet from the MPs. Besides…”
Besides what, me? ‘Besides, one of those guys is kind of secretly my boyfriend’? You wanna go there, in front of Mom and Dad and Nana and everyone?
‘Besides, one of those guys is kind of secretly my boyfriend who has a legitimate reason to be pissed at me ‘cause I’ve been a jerk lately’, maybe.
“I miss you guys, I love you guys, but I have to go now. It’s better for everybody, okay?” I stand, letting my mom hug me about fifty more times between the table in the kitchen and the back door.
They don’t let me leave without a few sacks of take out cartons, with which I have no problem. I can’t help feeling like the mood inside the Coyote is strained, and I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the same thing Duke went through when we had to skip out on his hometown and I should just be happy no one took my family hostage.
“Hey.” I set the food down on my seat. “Whenever you guys need to eat, there’s… You know, if you want it. I didn’t ask what, but… You know, probably something with chicken, something with beef. If you’re lucky, egg foo yong.”
“Find something I can eat while I’m driving?” Duke asks.
I find the egg rolls and pass them forward.
“Any sweet and sour pork?”
“It’s a kosher restaurant.” I sigh. I pass Ripcord the first carton at hand and a pair of chopsticks. “Eat it and like it. Hey… Roadblock, can I talk to you in the back?”
“Sure.”
I close off the back of the Coyote to give us a little privacy. My plan had been to have thought of something to say by the time we got back there, but I didn’t.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know. I’m aware I’ve been a little pissy.”
“So what else is new?”
“It’s being home.” I sigh, raking a hand through my hair. “My family doesn’t know about me. I mean, about the part of me that’s a part of ‘us’… that was… I can only stonewall so much and I could never lie to my family, they-they see right through me. I mean, if we were living in an ideal world? One without, say, Military Police on my doorstep? I’d like nothing more than to introduce you to my family. Except then they’d know, you know? Because-Because I’m afraid I’d…”
Why is this so hard? Why the hell is this so hard?
“Hey. Relax.” He squeezes my shoulder, and a little bit of the tension bleeds out, but it doesn’t exactly help the minor riot going on in my insides.
“Like, if it wasn’t a question of hiding from the law, I could introduce them to Duke and say ‘this guy’s my commanding officer and my friend’, and that wouldn’t be a lie, and everything would be fine. And I could introduce them to Ripcord and say ‘and this guy’s a part of my unit, and I don’t know him all that well yet but he’s an okay guy’, and that wouldn’t be a lie, and everything would be fine. And then… I keep thinking, I’d say ‘And this guy’s Roadblock. He’s my… friend’, but I’d look at you and I don’t know, like even if I didn’t go sappy for so much as a second, my family would know.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t sound okay exactly.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m ashamed-well, not of you-but it’s complicated. My Nana is a very traditional woman.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Maybe you’ve noticed this about me, but I cover my nerves with jerkishness.”
“I’ve noticed that about you. I knew that about you long before we started… this.”
Ah, ‘this’. The as-yet-unnamed thing that is ‘us’. The problem is there’s no good word for it because… well, what can we be? It’s not ‘dating’, because there are no dates to speak of. It’s not ‘sleeping together’, because except for the most literal sense of the words, that’s not happening either. Circumstances have not been kind to us so far, and you only get so much time alone when you’re on the run with two-to-four other people… It’s not ‘boyfriends’, that’s too juvenile to say out loud, even if I don’t mind thinking it. It’s not ‘lovers’, that’s too heavy, too real, and the sort of thing they’d hang us with if… If we were in a position for that to be our biggest problem, I guess. So we’re just two guys who steal kisses when we can and would totally die for each other, but there’s not a handy name for that.
“Are we okay?”
“Nicky…”
Whatever comes next has to wait, because apparently Duke had to take a corner hard, which means me not staying on my feet back here. Lucky thing I have a guy-I-don’t-call-my-boyfriend-out-loud-but-he-totally-is to catch me.
“Glad one of us was smart enough to hold onto something.” I laugh weakly.
“You’re lucky you’re cute, because sometimes you’re an idiot.” He kisses me.
“What, just ‘cause I wasn’t ready to get thrown around the back of the truck?”
“We’re fine. I don’t know what I’d do if we wound up down in Biloxi, but I wouldn’t be taking you to Sunday brunch. I mean, we always knew secrecy was going to be a part of this…”
“Yeah. Well. Just-I don’t mean half the crap I say. Or pay attention to myself when I’m saying it. So. You know, when I’m doing the jerk thing.”
“Yeah. Hey, not saying nothing good came of this. After following you down into the sewer, there’s nothing that won’t smell good compared to that.”
“Hey, I actually smell good for once. I showered. And spent ten minutes surrounded by food.” I point out. I smell pretty awesome.
He laughs. “Yeah, you’re… Yeah.”
His arms are still around me. “You know, I’m no longer in much danger of falling over…”
“I know.” He brushes my bangs back from my eyes and winds up running his fingers through my hair for a minute.
“Oh. Okay, then.”
“I’m just holding you.”
“I can live with that.”
“Good.” Another laugh, that isn’t so much a sound even as it is a low rumble that moves through his chest and into me.
“So is the plan to just hug me every time I’m an asshole?”
“Pretty much. That’s what my parents always did, when they started fighting. My mom said it’s impossible to stay mad at someone if you hug him long enough.”
“How’s it working?”
“Haven’t killed you yet.” He says, altogether too cheerfully.
“The others are gonna wonder…” I sigh. “We’ve been back here too long…”
My stomach rumbled.
“Huh. Also, I guess I have an appetite after all.”
“Me too. You seriously smell like green onions and garlic.”
Back in the Coyote, Ripcord’s moved up to ride shotgun, leaving Roadblock and I the back, seats across the aisle from each other.
“So what was that about?” Duke asks, and I catch his raised eyebrows in the rearview mirror.
“That was somebody apologizing for covering me in raw sewage. You guys got off easy.” Roadblock says.
Huh. Yeah, I probably could have apologized for that specifically. But it was a choice between that and just leaving him behind, which for all I knew at the time, was a potential death sentence.
“I’m sorry about the sewage thing.” I grouse, but when I have his attention, I offer a kind of contrite smile. “So, food?”
“I don’t know…” He is playing up this mad-about-sewage thing. At least I hope that’s it. It’s either that or the whole not-mad thing only works while you’re hugging and now he’s mad again. He doesn’t normally seem like the stay-mad type, but then again, most people do not enjoy the relationship I do to the sewer, so…
“Please?” Or, oh crap, oh crap, this is about the frozen burrito jab, which was entirely stress, and I kind of forgot I even said it until just now, and it’s the kind of thing you can say to one of the guys, but possibly it’s really not the kind of thing you can say to a guy you want to have sex with ever, I am really not sure about the rules on that…
“Okay, if it means so much to you, but you better not have given me dysentery back there.” He smiles and reaches across the aisle for a carton.
“That is not how you get dysentery.” I say. “You have to swallow it to get dysentery. I didn’t go anywhere near your face.”
“I thought you got dysentery from being on the Oregon trail.” Ripcord jokes.
The rest of us groan.
“How are you with chopsticks?” I ask Roadblock. Because of course no forks…
“I’ll manage. Or accidentally break ‘em.”
I look through the remaining cartons.
“Here.” I hand over the egg foo yong. “Just eat it with your fingers. There’s no sauce. Doesn’t even need any.”
It didn’t. Most American places coat it in gravy, which is weird. Then again, it turns out a whole lot of American places put pork in it, which is, from my perspective, weirder. I mean, yeah, it’s an Americanized dish and all, but gravy? On this, it would be sacrilege.
“These are seriously good,” Duke says from the front.
“Nana’s recipe.” I shrug.
“So your family runs a restaurant?” Ripcord asks, around a mouthful of chicken lo mein. Right, he wasn’t around the first time I mentioned it.
“Yeah. Grew up working there- don’t ask me to cook. I burn everything. I was strictly a busboy.”
“Anyone can cook.” Roadblock scoffs.
“Anyone but me. Flames everywhere.”
“Anyone. You just need a good teacher.”
Well, okay, point-no one in my family had ever actually tried to teach me. Maybe because everyone else in my family just picked food up naturally. The idea that someone would have to take one of the kids aside and actually offer instruction probably appeared as an alien concept. Cooking just happened, you watched and then you did. Except for me, the guy who can disarm an explosive device but once blew up the kitchen trying to make rice.
Well, Nana always said we didn’t really need any fancy electric rice cookers… Not that she expected it to get blown up by her grandson once we got one…
“When all this is over and we’re back to living civilized lives,” Roadblock continues. “I’ll teach you.”
“I don’t know-“
“It’ll be fun. You can repay me with secret family recipes.”
Yeah, take my bad luck in the kitchen and then multiply that by how distracted I’d be trying to work around someone I’d really rather be doing other things with. That’s a way to not burn down the kitchen.
I like the idea more than I ought to, though, of getting to feel domestic. I never thought I wanted that-I never thought I’d get it, so why bother wanting it?-but if we can get these charges dropped, if we can get…
Back to the army, where even if sleeping with men wasn’t a problem, fraternization is.
I can’t win.
“Hey,” Soft this time, for my ears only. “It’s okay.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking about.”
He shrugs and passes the egg foo yong carton back to me. “We’ll be fine.”
I pass him the rice I’d been eating in exchange, and a pair of chopsticks. “Here, like this,”
“Am I doing this right?”
I have to unbuckle and get half out of my seat to stretch across the aisle to fix his grip.
“I feel like I’m going to snap these in half.”
“You will not. Come on, big guy, you’re good with your hands, it’s not that hard.”
Crap. Nobody from the front seat look back here at me blushing, ‘cause I did not mean it that way.
Well… maybe I meant it that way a little. A little. But yeah, subtlety. I need to work on that.
Well, as long as I’m half out of my seat making a fool of myself…
“Like this,” I take the chopsticks back and pick up a bite of rice, and once I’m sure no one from the front seat’s looking, I feed it to him.
It is just not fair that one person just smiling could possibly make me this happy… but I’m getting used to it-at least, as much as you ever can get used to this kind of thing.
“Thanks.” He takes them back from me again, in absolutely no hurry for our hands to stop touching.