Page 39 of Constantly Cotton

Jason scowled and walked across the kitchen, putting his hands firmly on Cotton’s shoulders and turning him toward his food prep and then moving them toward Cotton’s hips.

“We’re going to do this again,” he said, voice gentle, and—oh Jesus—disappointed. “Let’s start with, ‘Cotton, how much of this meal are you going to eat?’”

“I’ll eat with you—hey!”

He had no sooner finished saying the words than Jason’s hands on his hips forced him back to his original position.

“Cotton, how much of this meal are you going to eat?” Jason asked again, his fingers tightening against Cotton’s hipbones.

“One chicken thigh and the tomato I sliced with a little bit of salt on it,” Cotton muttered. Jason’s fingers relaxed against his skin, and he started to move a little more as his hands moved. “Why was that so important?”

Jason sighed. “Cotton, what did Dr. Stevenson say to you that was blunt but effective?”

“Same stuff he says to—what are you doing?”

Jason had put one foot on either side of Cotton’s feet, and he couldn’t shuffle them, couldn’t side….

Step.

“My feet,” he said flatly. “My feet were my tells. You’re making me tell the truth by not letting my body lie.”

“Yes,” Jason told him, moving his own feet back and leaning against Cotton’s back for a moment. “It doesn’t work with hardened criminals, really, but it does work with people who don’t like lying.”

Cotton grunted. “Why do it at all?”

“Because you were leaving out the important stuff,” Jason said, leaning his cheek against the back of Cotton’s head. “I’ve told you more truth as a covert ops agent who isn’t supposed to tell youanythingthan you’ve told me as a young man getting his life together who shouldn’t have secrets of state pressing against his heart.”

“It’s dumb stuff,” Cotton grumbled.

“It’s private stuff,” Jason corrected. He let out a breath and moved backward, hopefully to sit down. “Never mind. I’m sorry. It’s probably wrong of me to force the private stuff. I just… I offered you my real stuff in good faith, Cotton. Why won’t you tell me the real things too? I may not be able to promise you forever here, but I want what we do, what happens between us, at least to be real. Don’t you?”

Cotton’s eyes burned. “Yes,” he rasped, looking sightlessly down at the chicken in the broiling pan. “Yes. More than anything.”

“Then you’re going to have to be brave,” Jason told him, his own voice hurt and oddly tender. “You’re going to have to tell me the real things or….”

“Or you might as well be having sex with the pool boy,” Cotton said, getting it. He looked over his shoulder to meet Jason’s eyes and was reassured, a little, to see they were bright and shiny too.

“I don’t want the fantasy anymore,” Jason said. “I’m old, and I’m sad, and it may not last, but it needs to be real.”

And Cotton opened his mouth then to tell him everything—everything—but at that moment there was a heavy-booted footstep on the porch, and the front door, which led straight into the living room, which then led into the kitchen, opened.

Burton’s voice boomed through the cabin. “Hello! If anybody’s naked, I fucking quit!”

“We’re in the kitchen, Lee!” Jason called back. Then he met Cotton’s eyes and said, “Think about it,” quietly, for him alone.

Cotton swallowed and nodded. “I’ll think about nothing else,” he promised, and then Burton strode into the kitchen and took in the preparations for dinner.

“That isn’t fried?” he said in horror. “You had chicken, you had eggs, you had flour—”

“But I didn’t have Rice Krispies,” Cotton said. “That’s what makes it perfect.” His feet slid sideways—he felt them—but Jason didn’t say a word.

He wasn’t lying about the Rice Krispies making the fried chicken tastier, so he and Lee exchanged recipes for chicken he could probably never bring himself to eat while Jason sat and rested and Lee set the table.

Someone Else’s Life

THAT EVENINGwas so normal Jason could almost weep for it. They ate dinner, and the conversation around the dinner table was about setting up the cameras and who would be arriving the next day and at what time—and about other things too.

Burton had seen a bear while he’d been up in the tree. In fact, part of the reason Jason and Cotton had gotten so many painful, wonderful moments alone together had been that Burton had spent part of his day up in that tree, hoping the bear and her two adolescent cubs would ramble on by. They did, but Burton must have recreated the moment a thousand times for a wide-eyed Cotton, who was enchanted to think there were bears in the surrounding woods.