Mixed Signals Page 2

  Frank frowned. “My potential went down in flames with my discharge.”

  “My God, you still on about that?” Nancy rolled her eyes and slammed her whiskey. The ability to hold her liquor was the other thing she got from their mother, Frank remembered. “No wonder you keep skipping out on this.”

  “Son, please, you’re young; you have at least two more careers left in you.” His father spoke kindly, like the wise old man on the mountaintop.

  “Father, I don’t think ‘figurehead for an investment firm’ counts as a real career. If I wanted to sit around and get paid to do nothing, I’d go to New York and take Uncle Peter up on his offer to become an underwear model.”

  His father grimaced at the reminder of his relationship with his younger brother. Some things really did continue through the generations. It was enough of a sore point to derail the conversation, which was Frank’s goal, and Nancy knew it. She bared her teeth at him while their father stared into his nearly empty glass.

  “Father, I enjoy what I do. It’s good enough. Let’s be honest: nothing is going to make up for me getting kicked out of the Air Force. That was my life.”

  Nancy let out a high-pitched groan. She knew how badly it had hit Frank to get kicked out, but as sympathetic and supportive as she had been through that whole disastrous scandal, she would never understand how hard it hit Frank’s dreams and goals. She had been the one to fight for wrangling things down to dishonorable discharge instead of a court martial, and she was the one whose shoulder Frank cried on when he finally realized that his military career was well and truly over. For all that Frank could up and strangle her some days, he trusted her not to make light of that one thing. Of course, that did not carry so far as her letting him wallow for the rest of his life about it the way he wanted to. She simply did not understand the concept of “derailment” and never would. Whenever the tracks of her life were pulled out from under her, she just grew wings and kept going. He admired that resilience, another gift to her from their mother, but he did not have that kind of iron will. In her world, there were no obstacles, because there was no right way or wrong way. There was only the effective way, the way of getting the most done with what you had at your fingertips, with no stopping for anything. It was why she was such a good politician, and Frank was glad she was on the side of righteousness and queer civil rights. He’d be screwed otherwise.

  His father sipped his drink and tsk-tsked. “I know it hurt. I know you did your damnedest to stay in the closet, and it’s a shame our country required that kind of deception of the honorable men and women serving in uniform for so long. But what’s done is done, Francis. Flying for a hospital network is admirable, I do mean that, but you’re thirty-four and wasting yourself. Fly on the weekends. Take my money and start a business. Hell, buy a small airline. I don’t care. I know whatever you do will be worthwhile.”

  By which he meant profitable, but Frank was not up to calling him on that after what had to be the most heartfelt speech his father had made since his own wife’s funeral the year before.

  “Dad, I… I don’t really… I don’t think I can do that.” Frank clutched at his own drink, unsure of where to take the conversation from there. The truth was that he had been gutted by his discharge, his plans completely derailed in a way that left no room for improvisation. He had decided to become a pilot and an Air Force officer when he was nine years old; twenty-five years later, he had no clue what other dreams he might have harbored. He certainly wasn’t harboring any as spares. He had never wanted to coast on his looks and his money, but the only firm commitment he had made in life was to the Air Force and it had basically dumped him like a bad breakup.

  That was actually a pretty good metaphor.

  Nancy remained silent, which set off alarm bells in Frank’s mind.

  His father let out a heavy, long sigh, and something about it sent a frisson of stress down Frank’s back. He saw Nancy straighten up, and he realized they had reached the point of the whole meeting, the reason his father had been demanding to see him privately for weeks. Putting down his whiskey, he looked Frank dead in the eye. “Son, I’ve let you grieve for your career, and for your mother, long enough. You need to pull yourself together now. We need you. Your sister needs you.”

  Frank blinked. He looked at Nancy, who had the good grace to look at least a little embarrassed. He turned back to his father. “What?”

  “The Sheldon name brings with it certain expectations. We need to be seen as a tight unit in support of her run for governor. She’s done well as a state senator, but the political winds lately have been… well. A little harsh.”

  Frank wanted to laugh. The political winds of late had been mean-spirited and vicious, with a very unpopular yet seemingly untouchable governor running the state. He could not run for a third term, but his party was already on full alert to make sure they kept the governorship in their nasty little hands. Nancy had just announced her plans at the start of the month, giving her a whole year to campaign like a madwoman. If anyone could beat out the legacy of their current no-good governor, it was Nancy Sheldon-Kane. Frank had not been keeping up with it. He generally avoided politics like the plague, which had served him well in the military overall… until it didn’t.

  Aside from showing up to a few campaign rallies and looking good for the camera, what was Frank supposed to do? He said as much, and Nancy rolled her eyes.

  “We’ll give you an official position as a consultant. Unpaid, of course, because you’re my brother, and you don’t need the money.”

  “Do you?” his father asked, looking skeptical.

  “Father, it would take me years to spend my inheritance, and anyway, Charanjit would call you if I started gambling it all away.” The head of the family’s wealth management firm had been handling Frank’s accounts since Frank was a baby. Frank couldn’t buy anything over $100,000 without a text alert being sent to Charanjit directly, and that had not happened since that one time Frank got leave in Europe and hit up the casinos in Monaco along with a whole bar’s worth of vodka. (The family had not let him ever forget about it, but to the officers who had been there with him, he was still an international hero. Worth it.)

  “Be that as it may!” Nancy said loudly. “You will be the campaign’s liaison to the gay rights groups. I need every queer in this state to vote for me next year.”

  “I do not want that job.”

  “Too bad, you got it.”

  “No. You can’t make me.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Children!” Their father tapped his whiskey glass on the side table next to his chair. When they both shut up, he looked at Frank, which was a bad sign. “This is important, Francis. You know how much Nancy’s political career meant to your mother.” His father coughed a little to cover his stutter at the mention of his late wife. “Nancy is going to be governor. We are putting a Sheldon into the governor’s mansion at long last, and to do that, she needs your help. I’ll be doing what I can at the country club and the social events, but you know that our politics put us at odds with a lot of the other families.”

  By that he meant specifically the other old, rich families of the state, most of whom had come into their wealth and prominence much as Frank’s family had done, generations ago. They all knew each other and they all had their fingers in plenty of pies, and several of them already had governors in their family trees. The Sheldons had mostly stuck to the fringes of politics right up until Dr. Alexander Sheldon married the redheaded spitfire Gracie Anne O’Grady, who was a feminist and had interned with Gloria Steinem and took politics very, very seriously. She had never convinced her reticent husband to run for office, but she had been involved in most of the major races of the state from the day she got back from their honeymoon. She served on her party’s state council up to the day she died. Frank was pretty sure she was still listed as a council member on the website. Gracie Anne had not come from money, so she always fought for the under
dog. Frank knew how important her legacy was to his father.

  “Father,” Nancy said warningly.

  It was an odd dynamic to witness, and the warning bells that had gone off in Frank’s mind earlier went back on high alert.

  “I’ve said my piece.” His father abruptly stood, downed the rest of his whiskey, and walked out.

  “What the hell?” Frank said to the door his father had walked out of.

  Nancy crossed the room and sat down in the chair next to Frank, her face a picture of pity and concern. He scooted away from her. “What?”

  “So, I guess you aren’t keeping up with the news?” she asked gently.

  “What news? What the hell? You’re freaking me out. What is going on?”

  “Ugh. Okay, I’m not good at the gentle touch.” She stood up and paced back and forth in front of him, stopped, and pointed at his face. “There’s a dark horse in the election, someone who has already gotten the governor’s endorsement after just announcing this week. Completely unexpected.”

  “Who?” Frank drawled, sitting all the way back in the chair and crossing his arms.

  She took a deep breath. “Paulson Teague.”

  “Fuck you, fuck Dad, fuck off!” He got up out of the chair and went to stomp out of the room. Nancy grabbed at his arm.

  “I’m sorry! If you’ll just listen to me—”

  “I’m not joking, Nance. Fuck you. I will not do this. Not for you, not for Dad, not for Mother.” He yanked his arm out of her hold and marched out of the room. He jogged up the wide front stairway and headed to the family wing of the second floor. All the kids still had their rooms at the mansion, the same rooms they had grown up in. The house had been grandly rebuilt in 1893 over the bones of the first Sheldon homestead, and through no small amount of investment since had only gotten bigger and more ostentatious over the generations. Frank officially lived in his luxury loft condo downtown, but “home” was still his bedroom with the old four-poster bed (that had belonged to one of his great-grand-uncles) and his model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. He made sure to slam his door for effect, knowing his father would cringe if he was near enough to hear it.

  He sat down at the desk by the window and put his head in his hands.

  He heard the door to his room open and his sister walk in. She used the step stool to launch herself up on the edge of the bed but did not say anything.

  “You could have opened with that information,” he accused.

  “I wanted to, but Father thought you should be eased into the whole thing.” She sighed, her hands clasped between her knees like she was a sullen teenager all over again. “He doesn’t know why you hate Paulie so much, but… he knows it’s a sore topic.”

  “I can’t do it, Nance.”

  “Here’s the deal,” she said, ignoring his declaration. “We all went to Eastlake Prep together. We know the score. Paulie is a spoiled, arrogant brat, and I don’t know what you ever saw in him, but that’s not my problem. My problem is that the Teagues are the only other family in this state who could put a candidate up against me with a hope in hell of winning. One of the reasons our opponents were so freaked-out when I announced my plans to run was that no one they had lined up came close to challenging me, not even with the governor’s endorsement, and they knew it. Paulie is the mayor of that fucking subdivision they call a city, and I honestly thought he would ride that out for the next ten years. But he’s decided he wants to be governor, and more importantly, he doesn’t want anyone from our family to be governor.”

  “Fuck.”

  “So!” She clapped her hands together. “I need someone who is not only better-looking than he is, but someone who can rattle him. He loathes you. He’s still in the closet, married to that poor ragamuffin of a beard who, I’m told, is drowning her hatred of him in alcohol and expensive shoes. He also brought in Gunster—”

  “What? That asshole?” Frank blinked in surprise. “I thought Dick was in New York being a lawyer for the mob or something.”

  “He was,” Nancy said with a grim expression. “Now he’s Paulie’s campaign manager.”

  “Seriously? Paulie’s pulling our old boarding school pals into this?” Frank rolled his eyes. Not that Richard “The Dick” Gunster was ever a friend of his, but the guy had clung to Paulie like a suckerfish even back then, always trying to scheme his way up the social ladder.

  “He’s pulling every resource he’s got into this!” Nancy raised her hands to the heavens in frustration. She snarled at him, pointing two sharp fingers his way. “He’s not going to try and court the queer vote, sure, but that is a voting demographic we need to win because he’s bringing all the old money into the race.”

  Frank glared at her, for all the good it would do.

  “The bastard should have come out of the closet years ago, but he was so busy trying to ruin your life, he forgot or something. Don’t know, don’t care! It’s going to work to our advantage.”

  Frank took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes, unwilling to argue (again) the point of whether Paulson was really behind his discharge. She had always hated him in general anyway. “I’m not sure I can face off with him at any social event without punching him in the face,” he admitted wearily.

  “Join the crowd. But here we are.” She huffed and crossed her arms.

  Frank studied her for a moment. She was an insufferable older sister, demanding and authoritarian by nature, but when Frank was outed and subsequently booted out of the USAF, Nancy had been the maddest of the whole family. Frank was angry and depressed, his parents angry and confused, Geoffrey angry and affronted, but Nancy had just been incandescent with rage and blamed Paulson despite not having even a scrap of evidence. If she had been a crime lord, Frank was not sure Paulson would have lived very long. She had vowed revenge against him more than once, and now it looked like she might get her wish.

  It was odd, because Frank himself had no need for revenge and would have rather just kept up his steady walk away from the past. But then, he was the baby of the family, as Geoff constantly reminded him, and having everyone nose into his business was a given. He wondered how much of this was Nancy setting this whole situation up as a belated, twisted gift for Frank, of the “look whose head I have on a platter for you!” sort.

  But no, he thought—if she was going to be underhanded about it, Paulson would have felt the pain a long time ago. Nancy was a politician, but she was not that ruthlessly Machiavellian.

  Which meant she genuinely needed Frank’s help with the campaign, which in turn meant there was no way he was going to turn her down.

  “God dammit,” he said, leaning back in the chair.

  “That’s the spirit!” Nancy jumped down off the bed, slapped him jocularly on the shoulder, and practically skipped out of the room.

  She was insufferable sometimes.

  Chapter Three

  BENJAMIN SAT down in his office chair with a groan. It was a state-of-the-art support system for his spine, but he spent too much time in it to ever be fully comfortable. It was one reason he did not mind being his little sister’s chauffeur, because it got him out of the house a little.

  “Hey, so what’s for dinner?” Rachel shouted from the kitchen. Their house was a small, run-down bungalow on the poor side of downtown, so it did not take much to yell from one room to the other.

  “Whatever you want to have delivered!”

  “Thai food it is!”

  Benjamin had no grounds to complain about that, given his passion for green curry, but he had to make noises of protest as a matter of course. Rachel ignored him, also as a matter of course.

  She was saving up for a new car (part of the punishment for “the incident” was to pay for her own car, along with going to AA every week), so food was usually on his dime. That was fine, because he actually got enough revenue from MudzNewz and his personal investments for them not to starve. Playing with the market was his least favorite thing, but the algorithms were easy enough to keep a small s
teady stream of money rolling in. His biggest problem, as always in everything he did, was his uncompromising ideals. He refused to accept advertising for MudzNewz, venture capital funds for his AI work, or go to work for a thieving capitalist corporation. His parents had been proud socialist Jews, and he was going to hold the line in their memory.

  Their very poor pecuniary memory, unfortunately. His mother had been a local news journalist and his father a local jazz musician, so they were rich in spirit and impoverished in every other way. Benjamin tried not to get angry about the unfairness of how little their hard work mattered, in the end, and how much their deaths screwed over his career plans and Rachel’s whole life. But there was nothing to be done for that, so he once again shoved those thoughts and emotions to into the dark corner of his mind where they belonged.

  Instead, he thought about the absolutely beautiful man who had, maybe, hit on him earlier that day in the salon. He was going to be thinking about that a lot, especially in the shower later. Benjamin was not the kind of “looker” who got hit on by anyone, unless everyone involved was drunk. He had a few enjoyable hookups in college, but mostly because he went to a large state college where sex, pot, and underage drinking were all easy to be had. He had mostly indulged in the former, not wanting to mess up his precious brain with drugs or alcohol, but not nearly as often as he had hoped because he was not good-looking and he did not have the social skills to make up for the lack of charisma. He knew his chances were next to nil with someone like that painfully gorgeous guy at the salon, with his perfectly tousled hair that Benjamin maybe wanted to run his fingers through.

  That guy, who was definitely familiar. Trusting his instincts, he googled “Frank Sheldon LifeFlight,” since Jane had offered up the fact that Mr. Too Sexy for My Hair worked for LifeFlight as a pilot and knew her husband.

  As the first results loaded, Benjamin nodded, because yeah, that was why he knew the guy, why his name was so damn familiar. He was the infamous gay brother of Senator Nancy Sheldon-Kane, who had the bad luck to be outed and thrown out of the Air Force less than a year before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed. Youngest son of the three Sheldon siblings, he had been their bright and shining star right up until everything came crashing down. He spent a year in the spotlight as a prime mover behind the scenes in the political movement to get DADT repealed and then just disappeared.