Capture & Surrender (Market Garden, #5)(54)

Brandon rested an elbow below the window and rubbed the back of his neck. “I met him at the VFW. Veterans of Foreign Wars. Couple of my buddies and I were eligible to join after our Iraq tours, so we checked it out. He was one of the bartenders on weeknights. I wanted to learn to tend bar, and he said he’d teach me.”

Frank briefly recalled the conversation with Raoul, when he’d said he’d stumbled across Brandon tending bar at a strip club. “So you like that sort of thing? Bartending?”

“Yeah. It’s a fun job.” Brandon smiled when Frank glanced at him. “Stefan taught me to mix all kinds of shit. Taught me some of the tricks, too. Flipping bottles and stuff. I’m out of practice, but I can still do it.” For a moment, he was quiet, gaze fixed out the windshield this time, and his smile was a mix of sad and nostalgic. “And one night while he was teaching me a few things after closing, we ended up staying until almost seven in the morning because we kept coming up with excuses not to leave.”

“Excuses?”

Laughing softly, Brandon nodded. “Yeah. I’d say I needed to practice this one trick a few more times. Make sure I got it right. And about the time I did, he’d turn around and say that as long as I had that one down, I could probably try another. I mean, we were both exhausted. You know how when you haven’t slept in too long, you start getting slaphappy?”

Frank chuckled. “Yeah, I do.”

“You would’ve sworn we were drunk. Probably just as well nobody was around, because we looked and sounded like idiots. And after the sun came up, we finally decided we should get home, but he didn’t think I was in any condition to get myself home. I had a motorcycle then, and he said he was terrified of me winding up splattered across the pavement, so he insisted on driving me home. Then he kissed me in the car, and that was it. No turning back.” His smile faded. “Not for two years, anyway.”

“Did he know?” Frank asked. “When you guys met, I mean?”

Brandon nodded. “He’d known for a few years. And I guess I kind of knew he wouldn’t be one of the ones to live for years and years. He was . . .” Brandon glanced at Frank. “He was a lot sicker. I don’t know if he was ever as healthy pre-virus as you are now.”

Frank winced. “That must have been hard on both of you.”

“Oh, yeah. But we had a good run. We really did. That first year, it was amazing. People turned up their noses at us because he was so much older than me, and because it was Virginia. Nothing quite like being gay when you’re spitting distance from the damned 700 Club.”

“The what?”

“You don’t want to know. Anyway, the second year, he started going downhill. I took care of him as much as I could, but once he had to go to the hospital at the end . . .” Brandon stared at something outside the car. His cheek rippled as he clenched his jaw.

Frank touched Brandon’s leg again and offered a gentle squeeze but didn’t say anything.

Finally, Brandon cleared his throat. “I didn’t see him the last six weeks of his life.”

Frank’s heart stopped. “What?”

Brandon cleared his throat again. Once more. “His relatives made sure I wasn’t allowed into the hospital or the hospice. He tried to fight them on it, but I had a friend give him a message for me. I told him I loved him, I knew he wasn’t the one keeping me away, and I didn’t want him using up his energy arguing with them. And I guess I kind of held on to some hope that he’d get better. He’d had a pretty bad scare a few months before and pulled through, but this time, he just . . .” Brandon shook his head, and his voice was hollow. “He didn’t have anything left.”

Frank couldn’t even find a breath. The thought of being forbidden from Andrew’s bedside made him ill. Even worse was imagining Brandon twisting in the wind for six long weeks while he was kept away from the man who’d taught him to mix drinks and kept him up until seven in the morning because they enjoyed each other’s company.

After a while, Brandon broke the silence. “That’s why I came to London. I needed to get away from home, and across the Atlantic seemed far enough.” He turned to Frank. “There’s no way in hell I can stay in a country where someone could keep me away from someone I loved when they were dying. Just . . . no way.”

“No, that’s . . . beyond the pale.” Downright evil. People like Chris, that wasn’t evil. Chris was scared, judgemental, and exceedingly rude about it, but this was a completely different level of human cruelty. He’d heard bad stories about the US, knew of a great many people coming to London to escape this and that, or trying to become invisible in a place where being a freak and an outsider was more or less the norm.

Worst thing that had happened to him and Andrew? Andrew’s business partner referring to Frank as “the current blue-collar crush” at a cocktail party, and Andrew delivering a scathing riposte to the effect that if he ever called Frank that again, he’d better cough up a few million for trying to buy Andrew out. Very civilised, very incisive, which was so very . . . Andrew.

“I’m so sorry,” was all Frank could manage. He’d had it easy compared to that. Worst thing was that people had expected Andrew to end up with another City type, and instead he’d fished Frank from the gutter.

Frank pulled into the driveway and killed the engine, then turned to Brandon. What he saw shocked him. Brandon looked drawn and haunted, like that past had clawed its way up to the surface.