Page 33 of A Queen and Her Knight

First published as part of a charity event in 2017

Set before the events ofThe Imp and Mr. Sunshine/The Firebird and Other Stories

Summary: The life and love of one John Summers. Gen. m/m

Tags: glimpses of John’s Army life, mentions of queerphobia, mention of the AIDS epidemic

Despite his fondness for small explosions, John had never thought of himself as a troublemaker. He didn’t cause mischief for the sake of maliciousness, he did it for a reason, even if other people didn’t yet understand why. Although, he could admit, sometimes the reactions amused the shit out of him. Theworld he grew up in had a lot of rigid, stupid, pointless rules and he thought someone should test them, and bend them—and eventually break them, where necessary.

His teachers had noted it. John had ambition and a good mind, but no respect and a disregard for detentions. John was considered unusual in a way that wasn’t welcomed in a small town.

He’d stood out in the Army too, as much as anyone could. He asked questions. He read too much. He apparently insulted people by using words they didn’t know. His COs had also noted that.

John had never understood why he was singled out, although he’d never minded much either, which might have been why. He was a B student with no money for university and no desire to go to the state college, so he’d joined the Army. That wasn’t special.

John even looked unexceptional, a balding white man in a suit, approaching middle age. He had always looked that way, except for the balding part, and hated it as a teenager only to embrace it by twenty-seven. He had never been striking or handsome, not even in his more physically impressive youth. None of which had ever stopped him from getting laid. Not after school with other scared boys, not in the Army, and not afterward.

Although a lot of that time was a blur to him now—the closeted Army days and the slutty era afterward when in college due to the GI Bill. He’d been free and aimless and finally found a place full of people like him. His parents had raised him to be his own person, but nonetheless had no idea what to do with him when he’d driven back for a visit and told them he liked men, he’d only ever liked men, and he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

After years in uniform, and the fucked-up, ugly reality of service in the name of US interests while seeing way too manymen like him, boys, really, destroy themselves out of fear of discovery, John had not been inclined to hide that part of himself anymore.

His father had mumbled something about the Greeks. His mother had swallowed her words and told John to clean his plate. They hadn’t talked much since. John had never stopped feeling that wound, but he’d done what they had raised him to do; been a scholar and a soldier, been his own man, never stopped learning, or fighting. In their way, he thought they were proud.

After that, John read a lot, and drank too much, and held any job that would teach him something. He lived in a shitty apartment on the border of the fairy village and old town Los Cerros, where queer humans had carved out a sort of refuge between outcast beings and elderly, usually poor, Latinos. Fairies liked him. He learned about shine, and glitter, and the dark shivering fear inside every fairy that they had no soul. They danced and fucked and stayed beautiful and hated themselves while the humans like them, the humans they loved, wasted away and died by the dozens and then the hundreds.

In a city the size of theirs, the loss had been shattering. Across the country, the death toll reached the hundreds of thousands by the end of the decade, people scorned, feared, shunned, and left to die by the government John had risked his fucking life for. Running for office to fight for the rights of their small portion of the city had been an act of defiance. He wasn’t in the mood for any more lies, delays, or bullshit, and neither were the outcasts in his district who had voted him into office and then kept him there.

The framed photo of him in Los Cerros City Hall as he’d been sworn into office while wearing jeans, a sleeveless shirt, and a feather boa someone had thrown on his shoulders as he’dmarched into the building, was, according to Rennet, the sexiest picture ever taken.

John supposed the younger body and slimmer build had something to do with that, even if he had been losing his hair by then.

The first year on the council had been difficult. The next year worse as the backlash truly began.

Funny thing about that though. He’d loved it.

The drinking all but stopped. The fucking too, because he’d had no time. John had gotten into actual, physical fights with council members he’d later watched lose their seats, absorbed information and procedure, and with it who was who and what they really wanted no matter what their public posturing—cruising as practical experience for sizing up politicians.

John sometimes thought that a lifetime of reading and fighting and fucking had prepared him for politics in a way nothing else could have, no offense to poli-sci majors. He knew a lot, and what he didn’t know, he could learn quickly. He wasn’t afraid of blood and dirt. He was adaptable. And there was very, very little that shocked him.

He got a nickname and it stuck. Times changed. He was joined on the council by more women and people of color. No one lisped at him—to his face at least. He was invited to lots of parties out on the bluffs and approached by old school, genteel, semi-closeted gays, the kind who would consider the fairy village a place to go slumming but now kissed his ass. He wore a suit to work and bought a pretty house in a neighborhood full of respectable citizens who didn’t know what to do with him. He expanded his library, and became more than just the outspoken queer on the city council, which he honestly thought was ashame. He had gotten away with so much when he’d been so consistently underestimated.

He was alone more and more, if he didn’t count colleagues. The queer humans of the village were wary of the limelight or disliked what they viewed as the soul-prostitution of politics. The fairies had left him long ago—they admired him, voted for him, but the attention he received made them nervous. They’d seen what happened to one of their kind when on the wrong side of a scandal. John missed them. He missed all of them, human and being. The sex, yes, but his human friends from that time in his life were mostly gone. It was the fairies and the occasional troll who remained, who would live on—whocouldlive on.

And then there was Rennet.

John had a house now, and a busy job, which meant he had to hire people to do things he couldn’t manage alone anymore. So, he’d called a number on a card for a handyman, and Rennet had appeared at his doorstep, the strangest combination of clumsy and graceful John had ever seen.

Rennet, with a body for sin, as the expression went, and a sense of humor best described as wicked, and hands that could carve and build like an artist but could also efficiently wrap detonator cord around a bundle of explosives. Someone else with a more conventional life, might have beheld Rennet and thought to themselves,I’m going to marry that imp, or,So this is love at first sight.

John did not make plans with definite outcomes because definite outcomes were impossible, and he had never once considered love at first sight to be real. So he had watched Rennet move around his house and comment on the things he liked—the books and records—and the things he was certain were going to break or fail—the hinges in the back door, thecorner of the roof over the garage, and thought how incredible it would be to see Rennet more.

The Incredible Unflappable Mr. Sunshine hadn’t a clue of what he’d been in for. Thankfully, no one in John’s life except for his secretary had been close enough to notice him floundering.

John didn’t make plans, he set goals. Yet he’d had no idea how to achieve them, or even what they were for the longest time. Only that he liked Rennet in his life and there had to be a way to keep him there somehow.

John wasn’t beautiful. He was an over-forty politician in a small city, who lived alone, slept alone, and whose hobby was reading. Rennet was—not too good for him, but too much, too interesting, too different, to want that sort of life. He had a punk’s sensibilities but a faint aura of sadness, age that had come with wisdom but also the eyes of a killer. He knew random facts that could never be learned in books. A dozen languages could trip off his tongue in between references to legends Rennet had known personally. He loved children. Of all the facts about Rennet that would have surprised those who feared him, that was the biggest. Rennet adored children and they loved him enough to spark something in John he hadn’t realized was there. Or maybe he had, but had never once allowed himself to think of it because he couldn’t have it.

It didn’t matter anyway. He was gay, and a workaholic who drank too much coffee, and two men couldn’t get married in his state, and human and being marriages were illegal too, and for a million other reasons, it didn’t matter. But that didn’t stop him from wondering and dreaming while Rennet allowed small humans to tackle him to the ground and came up grinning.

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