first inkling of what was to come.
Given how lost he’d been, how heartsore, it had seemed like a karmic mission of sorts. He was kind of excited to see what came next.
Next had been right after high school graduation, when he’d been working at McDonald’s—he and a friend had ended up doing it in her car in the upper parking lot. Afterward, she had broken down on a bemused Tucker and told him that her boyfriend had been cheating on her but she didn’t have the courage to leave him.
Until right then.
Tucker started to harbor suspicions that next might not be as wonderful as he’d hoped.
Less than a month later, when he stood up a girl he liked because he’d wandered into a bar and slept with a guy who’d been thinking about going to a party so he could get high and woke up thinking about college instead, Tucker began to understand.
And the only comfort sex had offered him then had been the comfort he apparently gave others in bed.
He’d explained it to his friend Damien the next day. First, Damien had needed to get over the “Oh my God, you’re bi?” But after that he’d been pretty copacetic.
“So you’re saying God wants you to get laid,” he’d concluded.
Tucker sort of frowned. “That does not sound like the Sunday school lessons I got growing up,” he said. Of course, his parents had been gone for about two years at this point, and he hadn’t attended a church service in a very long time.
Then he remembered something his father had said.
He’d been born late in his parents’ life—they’d been in their fifties when their car had skidded off the road during their date night—but his father had been a kind man, active, with salt-and-pepper hair that hadn’t even started to thin. He’d had laugh lines and kind brown eyes, and he’d told Tucker to go to church and soak up the feeling—the feeling of being protected.
“Ignore the words, son. Some people need them, but you’re just there to know what it’s like to find shelter from the storm.”
Oh. Apparently Tucker was shelter from the storm. Maybe God really did want him to get laid. Or the gods, really. Tucker had already identified vampires and elves and ghosts and werecreatures among the hosts of not-humans who walked the city streets with him. In an effort to broaden his knowledge, he’d begun taking classes in comparative religion, ancient language, arcane lore, and anything he could find even remotely connected. School was fun at that point—but the broader lessons hadn’t started to set in.
He looked at Damien, wishing that Damie was bi too, because he had a rich red mouth and dark blond hair and green eyes and freckled cheeks, and Tucker had wanted to kiss him for a long time.
But Damien was the kind of guy who always landed on his feet. If he got detention in school, he’d meet a pretty girl who’d want to be taken out Saturday night. Once when he’d been out of work, his car had broken down, and the Starbucks he’d gone into while he waited for the tow truck had been looking for a cashier.
Damien always found a sheltered path through life’s difficulties, simply on instinct. He never needed shelter from the storm.
He’d never need Tucker.
Tucker had always been the guy with pencils when the teacher gave a surprise test, the guy with the extra sandwich when someone forgot their lunch, or the guy with the spare jacket or the shoulder to cry on. Even before the McDonald’s blowjob and the sobbing quarterback, Tucker had a reputation as the guy people could talk to when life threw them a curve ball. He was a sympathetic ear.
Or an empathetic ear.
Talking to Damien, remembering his father’s definition of religion in contrast to his college professors’, it occurred to him that being the sympathetic ear might have become his cosmic mission in life—with the added twist of sex. Suddenly both the sympathy and the sex felt like a chore.
“Never mind,” Tucker had said, his heart breaking for the things he was starting to see he’d never have. “I get it now. I’m an umbrella.”
“And I’m an ice cream cone,” Damien replied, because he thought that was the game.
Tucker hadn’t been able to play, though. He was too busy thinking about how many ways being an umbrella could go wrong.
He’d found them. One night when he was in his twenties, he’d resisted the pull, sobbing from the wrongness in