Eight
Derrick
The weather was unseasonably warm for October, which was a good thing because the wedding was outside, and there were really no other plans if it ended up pouring rain.
It didn’t. Of course, it didn’t. Because this was Malcolm and Kyle’s wedding, and their fairytale romance wouldn’t allow for anything else. Not that Derrick was bitter or anything, except that he was.
“Cheer up, man,” Craig, who was standing beside him at the food table after the ceremony, said. Craig, his older brother, though not as old as Malcolm. Craig, who had all of the sensitivity and emotional feeling of a brick, as far as Derrick could tell. His brother who had run off to enlist in the military, but who had finished his tour.
He hadn’t re-enlisted for the same reason that Derrick hadn’t gone back to school. They were both taking a year off, and no one needed to ask them why.
John Hart was still sick, and Derrick knew that he wasn’t going to be able to leave his own father to suffer without his family around. Of course, Malcolm was here and always would be, and now he had Kyle, too, but Derrick couldn’t just go without knowing what was going to happen with his dad.
It was probably the same with Craig, which didn’t make his cheerful, superficial comment any easier to take.
“I’m cheered up,” Derrick informed his brother wryly, then shot a bit of a smirk toward Kyle’s best friend, Skyler, an overly serious and very beautiful young man who had ended up taking over for Anna when it had come out that she had been stealing from the ranch for years. She’d also been working for Wyatt, Derrick’s brother, who had actually paid Kyle to come get Malcolm to sell the ranch in the first place.
Obviously, that had gone very well for Wyatt, considering that Kyle was now married to the man that he had been trying to pressure. Wyatt himself was at the wedding, which Derrick suspected was simply because the man was trying to put a good face on it, but he certainly didn’t look happy about it.
Skyler looked startled when Derrick paid attention to him, and Derrick couldn’t help the little smile that crossed his lips. Skyler was sort of adorable. Not an easy person to get to know, but beautiful nevertheless.
He glanced around for Jessica, who had come to the wedding so that Derrick didn’t have to face it alone, but she was in animated conversation with Craig. Probably about football, which Derrick could take or leave but Jessica had a serious thing for. So did Craig. They should get along like a house on fire.
Instead, he made his way past Logan, who was glowering, for some reason, and headed for Skyler. Why not? It seemed like Derrick was unlikely to be going back to school this year at all, so he might as well make friends with someone in the house. Malcolm had never really forgiven him for leaving, and Logan, well, there were definitely issues there. Their father was happy to have them around, but he was sleeping a lot these days.
“Hey,” Derrick greeted the smaller man, looking down into his dramatic face, somehow both pretty, almost delicate, and handsome. He had enormous, sad-looking seafoam-green eyes, a full, vulnerable mouth, and a round face.
“Hello,” Skyler replied, looking earnestly back up at Derrick. With the formalities observed, they just sort of stood there, looking at each other. This was the most interaction that they had ever had, and Derrick realized that he really had put this off far too long.
“You wanna dance?” Derrick asked, and he couldn’t help but smile a bit when he saw the surprise on Skyler’s face. He had the sense, just from the very brief glimpses that he had had into this man’s personality, that he was the sort of person who stood back, who watched in silence—the sort of man who was used to being overlooked.
Skyler was lonely. And Skyler’s best friend, Kyle, had just gotten married. Right then and there, Derrick knew that Skyler needed someone, and there didn’t seem to be any reason at all that that person couldn’t be him. After all, Derrick needed a friend, too, and now that he was paying attention, it seemed like Skyler was even more desperate for companionship.
“I don’t know how,” Skyler admitted, and Derrick grinned and hooked a casual arm around the smaller man’s shoulders, tugging him along with him to the section of grass that had been set aside as the official dance floor. It was pretty packed, the music fast and free, and Derrick smiled down at Skyler.
“It’s not hard to dance,” he told him. “Not to a song like this. I mean, I’m not exactly Fred Astaire myself and I can manage. Just move with the beat. You’ll be fine.”
He demonstrated, and he knew that he wasn’t going to win any dance awards, but he could at least shimmy and shake along with the music and not make a complete idiot of himself. Skyler tried to follow his lead, but he was stiff like he couldn’t quite relax into it.
“Derrick!” Jessica’s familiar voice called out to him, and he turned to grin at her and wave her over. She was followed by Craig, who joined them, too, already bopping along to the music.
“Hey, Jess, you have to help me relax Skyler a bit. I could almost swear that he’s never danced before.” Derrick laughed, going around behind Skyler to put his hands on his shoulders, trying to rub them, to relax them a little.
“I’ll help,” Craig said, and he took a step toward Skyler just as the music changed to a slow ballad.
“Okay, folks, in honor of the newlyweds, this dance is for same-sex couples only,” the DJ announced, and to Derrick’s surprise, Craig and Skyler looked at each other and shrugged. Craig wrapped his enormous arms around the much smaller man, who seemed almost to disappear into Craig’s embrace.
Derrick definitely wouldn’t have expected that.
“Hey, Jessica, right?” Mary Anne, the teenaged farmhand, was grinning at Jessica, and she waggled her eyebrows at her with a playful grin on her face. “You wanna show these guys how it’s done?” She offered her hand with an exaggerated bow, and Jessica laughed and took it. Their dance was a bit more energetic than the music strictly called for, and they didn’t get nearly as close, of course, as Craig and Skyler were, but they seemed to be having fun.
Speaking of which, Craig and Skyler wereawfullyclose together. Or were they just getting into the spirit of the thing? Either way, he supposed that it wasn’t any of his business, except that he was a little surprised to see butch, masculine, military Craig be so open to dancing with another man. Still, Craig had always had a good sense of humor.
“So what, are all of the Hart boys gay or something?” Logan’s achingly familiar voice asked from behind him, and Derrick, irritated by the surge of pleasure he felt in hearing that voice, spun around to glare at Logan, arms instinctively crossing over his chest as though he could defend his heart that way.
“Bisexuality exists,” Derrick snapped. If Logan was looking to shame him for his sexuality, he wasn’t about to let him do that. He had been surprised to find out that he was interested in men, sure, but that had been years ago. And he’d been somewhere much more liberal than Kansas was in the meantime. The dig might have gotten to him once, but no longer.
“As you should know,” Derrick continued, gratified by the way that Logan’s face went slack with surprise. Obviously, he hadn’t expected Derrick to be so open about it, or to be willing to fight back. Derrick had changed, though, and he wasn’t the same kid with stars in his eyes that he had been before.
