Page 1 of Steady Stroke
ONE
“Damn,Linc, you’re worse than my mom when she’s expecting guests.” Roxy Bounds leaned against the now-sparkling kitchen counter and crossed her arms. “It’s not the president, dude, chill.”
Lincoln West kept scrubbing the sink with Comet, determined to get the thing to shine before he gave up. “Unless you want to grab a rag and help, go away.”
“I told you when we moved in that I dust and vacuum. I don’t do kitchens or bathrooms.”
“Like I could forget.” He worked another small spot of rust out of the metal basin. “You also don’t kill spiders.”
“That thing wasn’t a spider. It was an evil minion from hell come to haunt the bathtub.”
Lincoln chuckled at the high pitch Roxy’s voice took on at the memory of finding a camel cricket in the bathtub last night. The thing was ugly as fuck and as big as a poker chip, and having spent half her life in a nice house in the Philadelphia suburbs, Roxy was no longer used to finding big bugs in the bathroom.
After spending the last six years living in cheap-ass apartments in inner-city Philly, Lincoln was used to finding all kinds of creepy-crawlies around him.
They were spending the summer at the shore, using the apartment that his best friend’s boyfriend kept as a home base for when they weren’t traveling the country performing. Lincoln and Roxy had the run of a three-bedroom apartment that took up the bottom floor of a three-story, renovated house only a few blocks from the ocean. They’d been there for a week, and while Roxy had been successful at finding a job as a waitress in a local seafood restaurant, Lincoln kept striking out.
No one wants to hire someone with your issues.
He cleaned so he didn’t have to think about it. Besides, having Dominic home for a while would make him feel less like a complete and utter failure.
Roxy’s big brother Dominic Bounds and his boyfriend Trey Cooper had been hot shit for almost a year now, after performing together at a national music competition in New York City. Their act, called Off Beat after the quirky bar where they first met, was a big hit, because they combined Dominic’s stunning talent on the violin with Trey’s singing voice and keyboard skills to create some pretty fucking awesome music.
They were also disgustingly in love, which played well to more liberal audiences. Twice Dominic reported that they’d had to cancel in the South for safety concerns.
Lincoln adored the fact that Dominic was happy and doing what he loved, even if it made Lincoln feel like a car on cinder blocks—stuck, unable to move forward, thanks to some asswipe who ran his car off the road and sent him headfirst into a telephone pole last summer.
“Don’t you have to work?” he asked.
“Not for, like, another hour, so I’m free to torment you a while longer.”
“Yay me.”
The last bit of stain came off the steel basin. Lincoln rinsed it with warm water, then surveyed his work. Perfect.
“Seriously, Dom isn’t going to care if the sink is spit-polished,” Roxy said.
“No, but I do.”
Despite the shit-tacular way his relationship with his parents had ended, Lincoln had grown up in a very well kept house. Not a speck of dust or spot of grime on anything, ever. Partly to do with his sister Mercedes’s severe mold and dust mite allergies, and partly because his parents were all about appearances, some habits died hard. Lincoln had taken care of every bad apartment he’d ever lived in with the same tenacity he was showing Trey’s kitchen.
Plus it wasn’t his place, and he didn’t want the actual tenants to think he was taking advantage of their very generous offer to live here for the summer rent- and utility-free. The only things Lincoln had to pay for were food and fun; hence the need for a job. He wasn’t going to freeload off of Dominic’s parents forever.
He was twenty-five years old, damn it. He’d been taking care of himself since he was seventeen.
A slim brown hand covered his too-pale forearm and squeezed. “Just don’t clean yourself into a migraine, okay?” Roxy said. “Then Dom will get mad at me for letting you work too hard.”
He winked, then tucked the Comet container back under the sink. “Heard and understood.”
“Dom loves you, Linc. That’s not going to go away because he’s out there performing with Trey ten months out of the year.”
“I know.” In his head, he knew it. His heart was having trouble getting on board with the idea. He and Dominic hadbeen best friends for eight years, and they knew all of each other’s worst secrets. Almost all of them, anyway. What went unsaid sometimes left Lincoln feeling so isolated he ached from it.
Roxy pinched his biceps. “Maybe one day you’ll say it and I’ll actually believe you.”
He swatted at her, but she darted out of range.
Sink done, he turned his attention to the stove top, keeping his thoughts firmly on the task at hand. A while later Roxy shouted good-bye and the front door slammed shut. He was running a Swiffer mop over the kitchen floor when the first tiny pricks of a headache flashed behind his eyes. He put the mop away, then washed a pill down with water, hoping to stop the migraine before it started.
