ONE
It would take a miracle.
No big deal, they happened every day, right? But as Brett looked over at the person who meant the most in the world to him, the person who he knew very well that he had almost lost, he had to admit to himself that it was never going to happen. This particular miracle was going to be forever out of his reach.
He was just lucky that he had John back with him. That after almost dying, John had come home, come back to Brett. After all, John could have gone anywhere after being discharged, but he had come back to a city where he had nothing, no job, a crappy little apartment that Brett knew John could barely afford, with the military pension that he had gotten.
John had come back to Boston, though, and Brett knew that it was at least partially him. Or maybe even mostly him. And that, too, meant the world to him. Brett’s friendship with John was definitely not everything that he might have wanted from it, but it was the most relationship, by far, in Brett’s life. Any sign that John felt the same was something he cherished.
Look at the man now, sitting in front of the television. Only maybe sitting wasn’t exactly the right word, because John didn’t exactly sit. He draped himself, one foot up on the coffee table, spread out against the side and back of the couch, letting it support his strong, massive body.
John wouldn’t notice if Brett looked. He was watching the hockey game, the Bruins playing the Kings, and the Kings were up by one. The world could have ended outside, and Brett knew that John would never have noticed. Not as long as the massive men who moved with an odd grace over the frozen ice kept on moving, kept on trying to get the puck into the net.
It wasn’t the first time that Brett, furtive and guilty, had watched John as John watched the television. So he let himself take in every detail, gazed in wonder. He was thinking a lot about miracles these days. Maybe it was the Christmas season, the messages of cheer and joy and hope that were everywhere he looked.
Though he would never embarrass John that way, Brett wanted to tell him what a miracle he thought John was. So beautiful, a study in contradictions, with those round, soft emerald eyes and the full lips, almost too pretty for a man.
Once, before the army had toughened him up, made him broad and thick with muscle, John had looked different. Brett saw the differences now, though when John smiled, he knew that those differences would fade, at least to him. But there were the crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes, and those had never been there before. The strong body, that was a given, though John had always been stocky as well as tall.
John was too young for those crow’s feet, even as handsome and distinguished as Brett secretly thought that they made him look. He was too young for the haunted look that sometimes came into those eyes, because John, Brett knew, had given his country more than just his youthful energy. More than nearly eighteen years of his life.
Brett looked at him, looked at his profile, frowning slightly. He traced over the full, beautifully molded shape of those impossibly pretty lips, the determined nose, the sweep of long lashes as John blinked. Greedily, he stored up the details, because he had learned, after all the years apart, that he could lose John at any time. Almost two decades could pass, with only occasional visits to bolster Brett against the absence.
“Uh, is there something on my face or something?”
John never looked back at Brett, and Brett kept his watching to a minimum. The last thing that he would ever want to do is to explain to this man why he kept looking at him, that would freak John out faster than anything else. It would make things awkward, certainly and John, scared, might run from him. It was worth keeping this secret to keep that from happening.
So then, if John never looked back, why was he looking now?
“What?” Brett knew that he sounded like an idiot because John had spoken as clear as day. There was no way that Brett could not have heard, but he had to play stupid. So much was on the line, too much, because their friendship couldn’t survive in the face of how much Brett sometimes longed for John. Did it show in his eyes, the way he ached for John, the way he had spent so many nights awake, just thinking about his infuriating, irresistible best friend who was completely out of his league?
“You keep staring at me, man,” John informed him, and Brett saw the worst thing that he could possibly see reflected in those brilliant, luminescent green eyes. Curiosity. Because if John knew what was going on, that curiosity would turn to disgust, he already knew that. Why put either of them through that?
“Sorry,” Brett murmured, and he glanced down at his hands, which suddenly seemed much safer to look at than John. His hands wouldn’t judge him, wouldn’t look back, but when the buzzer which signaled that the first period was over sounded, and Brett, sure that John would have looked away by now, dared to glance up, he saw something frightening.
John was still watching him, and to Brett, he looked oddly thoughtful suddenly. Brett’s throat went dry, his tongue and inner cheeks like a desert, and he swallowed to try to work up some saliva, breathed deeply to try to settle his heart, which was beating so rapid it was more like a pulsing flutter than anything else.
“Hey,” John’s voice was deep and rough, a man’s voice, a voice that Brett had, far too often, imagined gasping out his name as that gorgeous body arched up off of the bed. Even back in high school, John had sounded like a man, and Brett had fantasized.
“Hello,” Brett tried, knowing that he must sound like an idiot. But he narrowed his eyes as he looked at John, and for the first time, he managed to get over his own awkwardness enough to look, to really look, at the expression on John’s face. Not just the lovely contradiction of his physical features, the beautiful and the masculine, but at the look that he actually had stamped onto his face.
Why had John looked back this time? Why, when he was always so utterly enthralled with the game that was on that Brett had always known that it was safe to look, did John raise his gaze away from the television set, and only mere moments before the end of a period in which the score was nearly tied and the tension should have held John more firmly enraptured than ever?
“What’s going on?” Brett shifted around on the couch, folding his legs under him as he perched there, his shoulder to the glowing television, facing John head on. He looked at him now as his friend, and his friend who, quite clearly, had something on his mind. John might be good at hiding things, but not that good. Not from Brett.
“What do you mean?” John was hedging, and Brett just waited. They both knew what was going on. It was very hard for John to reach out for help to anyone, and Brett flattered himself that he was maybe the one person in the world that John would reach out to at all. So he didn’t comment, he just arched his eyebrows and waited.
“Damn it,” John finally grumbled, though there was relief on his face, a slight relaxing of the tension in the corners of his round eyes and in his lips. Brett kept waiting, hands resting lightly in his lap, trying to look as non-threatening as possible. “How do you always do that? How do you always justlookat me and I want to tell you everything?”
Brett tried not to smile because whatever this was, it was serious, he knew that much. Still, the corners of his lips lifted a little bit. He meant something to this man, and whatever else was not between them, would never be between them, at least he had this friendship.
“What’s going on?” Brett asked again, head tilted to the side as he caught John’s gaze with his own and held it. All of this had been built up over the course of years, from the time that they had been children and John’s mother had walked out on him and his father. That was the first time that John had really talked to Brett, had spilled out all of his fear and his anger and the sense that he must have done something wrong to drive her away.
“It’s my place,” John spoke slowly, his face haunted. “They’re raising the rent again. I can’t afford it.”
“No,” Brett whispered, stunned. “No, you could barely afford to live there as it was.” And it was true. John had not always been able to afford groceries in the eleven months that he had been back. His rent took up most of the small pension that he got, so this was catastrophic.
“Yeah, well.” John gave a wry little shrug, a cocky look on his face that didn’t hide his worry. Not if you knew what to look for, and Brett did. John very much liked to present a stoic face to the world, emotionally speaking. He would prefer it if people didn’t even know that he had emotions.
