Shawn's Law (3 page)

My father died in a work accident when I was twenty-six. By then Mum was starting to show early onset of her disease. Within six months, I had moved back home to care for her. Lisa had a toddler and was pregnant with twins, so she wasn’t able to look after Mum. I managed to keep working full time for another year, but it soon became obvious that Mum needed more. I willingly gave up my job as a high school economics teacher. I don’t think the Education Department mourned my loss.

So, at the grand old age of twenty-nine, I was still pathetically single, unemployed, and technically living at home with my mother. My hobbies included growing my own vegetables, painting seminude men, and reminding my mother six hundred times a day that my name was Shawn. Yeah, I can tell you’re impressed with how full my life was. Hence my need to perv on Hippy-Hotpants each day at four o’clock.

Unfortunately the day following my spectacular skid on the catalog featuring a bunch of half-naked girls, I was unable to fulfill this activity. I was at the local radiology place having my tailbone X-rayed for fractures. Thankfully there were none visible, and the doctor told me I just had severe bruising. If I needed to sit, I should sit on a cushion. So the next time I managed to clap eyes on Hippy-Hotpants, Shawn’s Law had come into play and I was being loaded into the back of an ambulance at my house.

“Oh, my God. What happened? Are you all right?”

At first I thought I was hallucinating because I could hear his voice so clearly. Then I realized it wasn’t the medication. The man I fantasized about nightly was standing next to me.

“Hey.” I smiled as I waved my Penthrox inhaler in his direction. “Hippy-Hotpants. What are you doing here? Is it four o’clock already? I’m so glad I didn’t miss you.”

Penthrox is a great drug. I love it. It makes me chatty and brings out my social side. The flip side is that it makes me chatty, and I usually say things I would never admit, even under torture. I’m a regular with the Penthrox. Unfortunately.

Hippy-Hotpants blinked twice at my greeting, but recovered enough to smile. “Whoa, man. What do they have you on?”

I giggled like a six-year-old girl. “Penthrox. Love this stuff. You want some?” The inhaler hung on a string around my neck where I could inhale it as much as I wanted. I offered it in his direction.

“I’m fine,” he chuckled, pushing the green device back toward me.

“Oh, yes you are. So, so very fine.” I nearly died with embarrassment the following day when I recalled saying that. But he took it in his stride and smiled warmly at me. I was staring at that beautiful smile and doing some loopy smiling of my own when Greg tightened the bandage around my leg and caused me to yelp. I knew the two paramedics, Greg and Tania, from the two other times they’d come to my place.

“Sorry, Shawn,” Greg told me. “Just take another sip of that stuff and you won’t feel a thing.”

I was pulling a deep breath through the inhaler when Hippy-Hotpants asked, “What happened? Are you all right?”

Did I mention Penthrox made me chatty? “No,” I told him as solemnly as I could in my medicated state. “I’m not
all
right. For some odd reason, I came out half left. It’s a condition I’ve suffered from since birth, being half left and half right. It’s rather terrible, and I’m sure there’ll be a documentary made about me one day. But until they can find a cure, I just have to put up with it the best I can.”

He stared at me for a moment with one cocked eyebrow, and then he looked over at Greg, who was securing the straps around my body. He probably realized around that time that he was never going to get a straight answer from me, or even a coherent one. Greg answered. “Snakebite. Got him good by the looks of it. We’ll take him in, and they’ll give him some antivenom. He’ll be right as rain, ready for the next time.”

Hippy-Hotpants went a little pale. “Snakebite?”

“Yeah,” I answered happily. “Out the back. Dugite. Not a huge one, so I managed to get it in a bucket after about twenty minutes, to show the guys. It only took me four goes. You have to get the snake so they can identify the species and give you the right antivenom.” I watched as Hippy-Hotpants turned even more pale under his tan.

He fixed me with a stare of disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You got bitten by a snake, so then you chased it around your backyard for twenty minutes so they would know what type of snake it was?”

“Yes.” I smiled loopily at him. “Then I called the ranger, and he gave me the number of the man in the area who removes snakes from houses. Y’ can’t kill ’em, ya know? Pro-teck-ted species.” My words were beginning to get a bit slurred. “So, then I waited for ’im to turn up and m’ leg was turnin’ a bit red. He called the amb’lance for me.”

I could tell that my natural charm was working because Hippy-Hotpants was staring at me speechless. Tania arrived, and together they put me in the back of the van. Tania asked, “Shawn? Can we ring someone to come and sit with your mother? You’re going to be a while at the hospital.”

I waved in my new friend’s direction. “Ask Hoppy-Hippants. He’ll be nice.” There was a whispered conversation going on somewhere when I said to Greg, “Greg? M’ leg’s all tingly.”

“Yeah, buddy. That’s the venom. Have another whiff of Penthrox and we’ll have you fixed up in no time.”

Harley

Curves and Lisa.

O
F
COURSE
I’d noticed Shawn before our first words were exchanged.

He doesn’t believe me, but it was at least two months previous to that first meeting. I remember it because I hadn’t long returned from overseas and I was trying out the local shops near my new rental house. I like my organic stuff and my authentic foreign food, so I was giving the local supermarket a go when I saw him for the first time.

Although Shawn denies it categorically, I remember it clearly. It’s imprinted in my memory for all time: I was looking over the selection of dog food that was in Aisle 8, when a voice came floating over from Aisle 9.

“I need some of these.”

I could immediately tell the voice belonged to an older woman. She had that husky vibration women get in later life. Her statement was met with exasperation from a male voice.

“Mum, you don’t need any of those. Put them back.”

“Excuse me? How would you know?”

“I know because you’re sixty-three years old and you had your uterus removed nearly twenty years ago. You don’t need tampons, so put them back.”

At this stage I felt my eyes widen dramatically and I nearly bit my tongue in amusement. I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but their voices were clear and the supermarket quiet. This was so not the conversation I was used to hearing in the markets in Bali. I just had to move to the end of the aisle and take a peek around the corner to see this mother and son duo. The two of them argued on, unaware of my attention.

“How dare you suggest such a thing, young man? My uterus is my business and you shouldn’t go around talking about it.”

“I will talk about it if you insist that you need tampons. Please believe me that you don’t need them. Now how about you go over there and choose a shampoo that you like?” I couldn’t believe how reasonable the man was. His voice held more amusement than anything, despite the outrageous claim his mother was making.

“Hmph. Just you wait until it’s that time of the month. You’ll be sorry then.”

“Sure, Mum. When it happens, you tell me, and we’ll deal with it, okay?”

I stuck my head around the edge of the stack of toilet paper and saw him. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but I definitely felt a zing of attraction. Shawn is wonderful, although he can’t see it. No matter how many times I try to explain it to him, he screws up his face in this adorable frown of skepticism and doesn’t understand. Shawn is just that—adorable. He calls himself tubby, but he isn’t. Not really. I like to use the term curvy, but he reacts badly to that phrase. He tells me that women are curvy, not men.

And Shawn is definitely a man. He has short black hair and a strong jaw that needs to be shaved twice a day to keep the shadow off. He wears endearing black-framed glasses that look cute and geeky at the same time. He hates his glasses and is always threatening to buy something hip and cool, but he never gets around to it. Too many other things happen in his life. But there’s no getting around the fact that he’s short and has curves—his legs are curvy, his butt sticks out and his chest is rounded. He would never be called svelte or willowy, and that’s more than okay with me. I don’t need a stick figure in my bed. I prefer someone I can hug. He’s not overweight or unfit or any other label you try to stick on him. He’s just built like a curvy, short man, and I love him exactly like that.

That day when he tumbled down the steps at the front of his house was not the second time I’d noticed him either. How could it be when I’d been deliberately taking the long way to the park for months, just hoping to get a glimpse of him out the front of his place? At first I wasn’t sure if he’d seen me, but Shawn isn’t exactly subtle. He scoffs at me and reckons I read body language or have some sort of ESP, but the way Shawn checked me out was the exact opposite of understated. I noticed him washing windows and sweeping the driveway. I thought he was just getting ready for a big party at his place or something. I also thought that the way he stared at me the first couple of times was because he was memorizing my face to dob me into the police for the latest burglary in the area. Shawn’s like that, you know. He does the right thing and keeps an eye out for his neighbors.

I was going to stop and say something to him—you know, introduce myself or ask him on a date or something—when he did the best thing ever.

When I first told Shawn the story, he turned bright red and fell off his chair. He ended up rolling his ankle with that stunt and was on crutches for two weeks. How he managed to sprain an ankle falling off a chair still bewilders me. Sometimes, with Shawn, you just need to roll with the punches. If you stress out over every calamity and injury, you’d be in the mental hospital within a month.

The reason I didn’t introduce myself had to do with his butt. Yes, you heard me right. Shawn’s beautiful, curvy, plump butt. Oh, man. I can wax lyrical about that part of his anatomy. On that particular afternoon, I’d come home from work and changed my clothes, checked to make sure I looked good, then grabbed the dogs. I lived up the very top of the hill, at the highest point of a road that did a loop. The dog park is just down the hill to the east, about a ten-minute walk. But instead I turned west and took the other route down the hill, so I could cut through the back pathways and walk past Shawn’s house. It added another five minutes to my walk, but I willingly made the detour every day. I eagerly popped out the end of the cul-de-sac, and there was Shawn, on his hands and knees, waving that rounded portion of his body in my direction.

Instant boner.

Now, for those who don’t know me, I’m a believer in what one of my mates refers to as “free balling.” I just think of myself as a modest nudist. I love the freedom of not having elasticated clothing around my various body parts. In foreign countries, where it’s not too strange, I adopt flowing tunics and robes as my daily coverings. My at-home attire contains a lot of loose fabrics that whisper over my body and don’t cinch or pinch me in any way. That particular day I was wearing a wide-neck blouse that allowed the breeze to penetrate and a light pair of loose, cotton trousers that stayed on my hips with a drawstring. Nothing else. In other words, nowhere to hide.

Shawn was kneeling on the grass of his verge, digging a hole with his hand to fix a connection in his sprinkler system. I stopped so suddenly that I nearly choked my poor puppies, who were eagerly trotting along this known path on their way to their daily fun time. I hoped that no other neighbors were gawking. Not only had I sprung a boner, I had also started to drool at the sight of that meaty piece of arse.

Meaty.

I remember thinking that word. I remember standing there and thinking to myself,
Harley—that is an arse you can hang on to. That’s one deliciously meaty arse.
Unfortunately thinking of meat brought to mind other parts of men’s anatomy that are commonly described as meat, which didn’t help my predicament at all. My erection was tenting my pants for everyone to see, and I was about to be found out. I knew that Shawn would turn around and spot me at any second.

My savior was my Blue Heeler cross, Picky. Don’t ask how she got the name Picky. Just know that I spend half my salary at the butcher because she’s a lady who refuses any food that doesn’t cost at least fifteen dollars per kilo. I willingly purchased porterhouse steak for her the following day because she somehow knew I was in trouble and did the only thing she could think of to help. She squatted and deposited her shit on a nearby piece of lawn. I sighed in relief and grabbed my yellow disposable doggie-do bag to pick it up. Show me a man who can keep an erection while picking up dog shit, and I’ll point out that he needs serious counseling.