Page 18 of Freedom
Jake spread his hands. “See? Piece of cake.”
“Right.” Toby dipped his head and punched in the number. His shoulders became two brittle lines of tension, and his left hand started to lock around his calf, but Jake slipped his hand in between before he could, and Toby held on tight to him instead. His eyes shut tight as Jake heard the muffled sound of Papa John’s picking up.
“Uh, hi, yes—I-I’d like to place an order. For pickup—no, delivery, I mean delivery.” Toby was rocking slightly in agitation, and Jake tightened his grip on Toby’s hand, trying not to hate himself as Toby stammered the rest of the way through the order. He enunciated the name of their hotel and room number with painful clarity, and Jake winced and wanted to go and punch the bastard when the employee hung up halfway through Toby’s goodbye.
Toby exhaled without opening his eyes, slowly releasing the phone until it dropped onto the bed. Then he pitched forward, face-first into the pillows.
“Toby.” Jake rolled onto his side, rubbing his hand slowly over Toby’s spine, checking to make sure he was still breathing, because fuck, you never knew. “Hey, man, you did it. You got through it, that was good. You’re a fucking badass. That weaselly little bastard’s gonna bring us pizza, and he didn’t think a damn thing.”
“I hate this.” Toby’s voice was heavily muffled in the pillows, but Jake stopped his hand. Toby turned his head, like he thought Jake hadn’t heard him the first time. “I hate how hard this is. It’s stupid. I know it shouldn’t be hard.”
“Says who? No one’s making rules about what’s supposed to be hard and easy for you. And every time, it’s gonna be easier.” Jake kept rubbing Toby’s back, thinking. “Hey, you wanna pay the guy when he comes?”
Toby opened his eyes wide and stared at him. And then he tipped his head back and made a noise that was somewhere between a choke, a laugh, and like he got sucker punched in the abdomen. “No.” He shook his head, smiling and hyperventilating at the same time. “No.”
And Jake laughed a little with him because that sure as hell hadn’t been a No question, and Toby knew that just the same.
Chapter Four
Toby was hungry, andthe bars weren’t open. Sure, Jake had no concrete proof that Toby was hungry, but Jake could pack in a cheeseburger right now, and he figured that anytime he could eat, Toby could use another layer of fat.
They stopped at a diner, a dinky mom-and-pop affair with vinyl booths and coffee that practically ate the roof off Jake’s mouth. The cheeseburgers on the menu looked disgusting, even to Jake’s admittedly obscenely high grease tolerance, so Jake ordered two stacks of blueberry pancakes with bacon on the side, an orange juice, and a milk for Toby. Jake still got twitchy when he thought about those long days of flu and misery, when he had thought Toby might breathe out and never take another breath in again. It wasn’t in Jake’s nature to think about food groups or say no to cholesterol, but for Toby’s sake, he would try to keep down the grease and increase the vitamins whenever he thought of it.
“Like it?” Jake nodded at Toby’s pancakes, blueberry sauce dribbling off the oily-but-still-delicious berry-filled cakes.
Toby swallowed his latest bite, met his eyes, and smiled. God, Jake loved that smile. It almost made his last draft of coffee taste good. “Yes, Jake. Though they’re a little...” He shrugged, probably lacking the vocabulary yet to properly criticize the crap Jake fed him sometimes.
That was fine. Jake could give him a crash course in salty, sour, greasy, and swimming-in-mystery-sauce as soon as they got back to the Eldorado. Right now, he was just going to enjoy that smile.
But a bark of laughter from the assholes behind them made Toby wince, and maybe Jake should be giving them a crash course in basic table manners. Like, if Toby is goddamn smiling, you keep your damn mouth shut, or one Jake Hawthorne will close it for you. He looked over Toby’s shoulder, scowling. The three dudes sitting at the counter were another set wishing for a bar, if the amount of liquid moving from dented flasks to the coffee mugs was any indication. Or maybe they were just trying to sterilize the coffee before ingesting it.
“Hey,” said one with a huge, bushy beard and the shakiest hands, “did I tell you Margie thinks they’ve got goddamned rats now?” He took another drink of coffee and laughed, the same laugh that had Toby flinching a moment before. “If it ain’t one goddamned thing, it’s another. Fucked, shorting electricity, floor settling, damned if that woman’s had a piece of luck since she gave that shit what was coming to him.”
“Damn straight,” said the youngest, a kid with an orange-red crew cut and slightly slurred speech. “Damn fucking straight. Would have shot him in the head myself if I knew what that fuck—”
“Keep your mouth off the dead,” said the third. “Just drink your damned coffee.”
