Shiny! (10 page)

Cara looked thoughtful. “That’s sort of awesome,” she conceded. “I’m happy for you.”

Will smiled. “Yeah?”

When she smiled, she was amazingly beautiful. “Yeah. Baby, I’ve always thought you had this just… transcendent person inside you, and you, I don’t know, you hid him. Plain clothes, plain haircut, plain job. But I would
hear
you making up these worlds, telling yourself stories, and I thought, ‘You know? This kid has some greatness in him. He just needs to let it out!’ And you right there? You were
shining
,
you were so happy.”

Will’s face heated and he took another bite of sandwich. “Thanks,” he mumbled, trying not to spit out crumbs. “Mom seemed okay with it too.”

“Well, you
are
the apple of your mommy’s eye. She’ll be rooting for you to hook up like a madwoman.”

Nope. Blush not going away. “Well, right now it’s all figurative. I’m doing lots of, uhm, homework, you know, into the, uhm, mechanics of—”

Cara was famous for her no-bullshit eye-level. “You’re whacking off like it’s a sport and you’re training for the Olympics, aren’t you?”

Will grinned, because you so rarely got to brag about something like this. “I’m about to get a bronze in the nationals and I’m hoping for a gold sometime in the next week.”

Cara threw back her head and laughed, and they settled down to watch the Hawaiian team trounce the Chicago team on
Battle of the Sandwich Wagons
or whatever it was that Cara was invested in today.

By the time they were done eating, Mom had gotten home, and it took five minutes with Cara behind the remote control before they had settled into their televisional/conversational groove. Will had heard it and participated since he was very small, but he never tired of it.

“CeeLo—like the tat.” That would be Aunt Cara, who could get away with saying words like “tat” without sounding like she was trying to be young and hip.

“But what if he ever wants to grow hair?” Will’s mom said plaintively, and Cara sent her a blatant look of pity that fit right in rhythm. Deucalion padded from the back room like she’d said his name. “Like Deuc? I think he wants to grow hair, and it always feel so unfair.”

“I’m thinking he will grow hair,” Cara said patiently. “Except
unlike
Deucalion, hair is not a thing CeeLo wants to grow!”

“Don’t be bitchy, Cara. It was only a question.” Deucalion let out a devil
mreowl
and started rubbing back and forth against Will’s mom’s arm. He was affectionate, for all he looked like a giant scrotum, and Mom picked him up and cuddled him like he was Kenny’s Princess.

Cara shuddered. She was the one who first noticed that the cat looked like a giant scrotum. “If you want to ask a question, ask whether or not Christina Aguilera shaves her coochie. That dress gets any shorter, we’re gonna have a front-row seat.”

“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to care or not about Christina Aguilera’s coochie,” Will said, wondering if that was a gay line in the sand he didn’t know about.

For a moment Cara looked like she was seriously thinking about something, and then, as the pause was about to get important, she just shrugged. “Well, you know us gardeners: it’s all about the bush.”

Will laughed like he was supposed to, but he was aware, even as they settled into their banter, that maybe he wasn’t the only one who was thinking seriously about lines.

B
UT
HE
was not thinking about gardening
or
coochies the next day. In fact, he was mostly thinking about snapping Kenny out of his funk.

Help me
, Kenny texted around eleven—just when Will was trying to figure out what excuse he could use to text Kenny, actually.

What’s up?

I have nothing to do and I’m two seconds away from dressing up and finding a bar.

You have beer.

High-alcoholic beer leftover from the time Will accidentally got Kenny drunk.

For a pity fuck, Will! I’m single and depressed!

Oh shit. Will was
so
not ready to share Kenny with anyone, even if it was just a strange cock Kenny would never see again.

I’ll be over in
—Oh shit. Will was running out of gas money, and the rain had let up the night before. He had to ride his bike.—
thirty. No pity sex. You have more self-respect than that.

Fine. What are we going to do instead?

Will had already showered, thank God, and now he was running around his bedroom shoving shit into a backpack—spare change of clothes, sweater, wallet with dwindling cash in it.

Do you have cash and gas?

Yes—I can spring for you.

I can pay my own food. Wanna go to the beach?

There was a pause then, a long one, and Will kept packing stuff in hope. Finally, as he was hovering at his threshold, his bicycle under his hand, his phone buzzed.

I’ll pack a lunch. We’ll get sodas out of town. Dillon’s Beach is calling our name.

“Woo-hoo!” Will’s holler of triumph probably woke all his neighbors, but Will was getting the hell out of Dodge.

A
N
HOUR
later, after a quick stop at Safeway for ice, crackers, and sodas, they were buzzing down the road in Kenny’s little smart car and Will was trying to be philosophical about having his knees up to his chin and feeling like a deformed beetle skittering on the smooth tarmac of Highway 80.

“So,” Kenny said once they had the stereo on (White Stripes and Cage the Elephant—good traveling music), “what prompted this little excursion?”

Will looked at him in surprise, flipping his hair out of his eyes as he did so. It was getting long, and the side part thing made it flop in his face really damned quickly. “You did,” he said, wondering if he should go back and check his phone to make sure. “You were talking about going out and getting laid out of depression—I mean, that’s a
terrible
reason to get laid!”

Kenny snorted softly. “Well,
yeah
. But nobody’s ever talked me out of it before!”

“That was their bad. Didn’t you meet Gif in a club?”

“God. Yeah.” Kenny accelerated and buzzed past a truck, which to Will looked like a mouse buzzing past a Triceratops. Poor little mouse. Run, you fearless little bastard, run! “Okay, so clubbing or drinking or whatever is a bad idea right now. I hear you. But the beach?”

Will remembered his aunt Cara yesterday and the way she used to just
arrive
and take him and his mom off to adventures. Yeah, sometimes the adventure was just to go help her pick out flowers or visit an art gallery in the foothills, but sometimes they ended up in Tahoe tracking down a plant on someone’s property, or out on a llama farm looking at stool samples for acidity, or… hell,
anywhere
. And sometimes, the beach.

“My mom’s best friend,” he said, because hiding things was not in his nature. “She’s… well, my dad was a good guy, but he wasn’t really…
spontaneous,
you know? And my mom’s best friend, she used to come by, like, once a month, or sometimes once a week, and just… just haul us off to an adventure. And sometimes, when we were lucky, the adventure would be by the ocean. So, you know, I wanted an adventure for you. Some place the hell out of Sacramento, you know? You can be a whole new person with whole new stress responses, right?”

Kenny cast him a sideways look and nodded. “Will?”

“Yeah?”

“You… has anybody told you you’re sort of special?”

Will wrinkled his nose. “You mean like special ed? Because yeah, I got told that all the time, but I’ve got to tell you, those kids were really sweet—I took it as a compliment.”

“No, asshole!” Kenny snapped, but his voice was sort of choked, so Will assumed he wasn’t being mean. “I mean like you’re a really good person. Like… you
are
that sweet. You
are
special. It’s like… like I never used to believe in God before, except he made you knock over my trash can.”

Will started laughing. “My aunt Cara’s pagan. She’d say that Goddess made me knock over the trash can.”

Kenny sniffed, and Will watched him struggle to make the moment lighter. Finally he smiled like a little bit of sunshine as they drove into the Bay City fog. “Yeah, well, the Goddess must have felt bad for me—that was one prime collection of dildos I was throwing away.”

Will grinned, suddenly feeling like the heavy moment, the frightening one, had been left behind in the buzz of the car’s engine. “You know. Think of it as a sacrifice to the Goddess. You got a better life in return, one free of that total douche bag.”

Kenny grinned and cranked up the radio. The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” sort of roared out of the radio, and what the hell. Sometimes Will was as down for a musical ass-kicking as the next guy. He opened his window and Kenny did the same, and they belted out the lyrics, because that was what it felt like to be free.

W
HEN
THEY
got to the beach, Will grabbed his backpack and helped Kenny with the snacks and the drinks. They set up an old beach blanket of Kenny’s and an umbrella—because apparently Kenny was more sun sensitive than the underside of an albino lizard (Kenny’s words, but Will could see it in the fairness of his skin)—and generally made themselves at home. Will had brought a paperback copy of Christopher Moore’s
Sacré Bleu
,
which he planned to read later, but first….

“What are you doing?” Kenny asked. He was in the process of sitting on the blanket, but as he watched Will rifle through his backpack, he stopped.

“I got this thing like two years ago,” Will said excitedly, producing a little rainbow package of colored fabric. “I was going to fly kites when I worked at San Juan, but we had like, no wind for the entire week of the science project, which sucked because they were
making
kites, so I never got to use it.”

“I forget,” Kenny said, standing up fully and coming to peer over Will’s shoulder as he unrolled the frameless kite from its little package. “You’ve got to know a hell of a lot to teach grade school.”

Will nodded seriously. “Liberal studies—people laugh, you know. They’re like ‘liberal,’ must be ‘easy’—but you’ve got to be good at
everything
before you graduate, and then there’s the credential, which is a whole other skill set, and….” He remembered his prospects for jobs at the moment, which mostly consisted of walking into other people’s classrooms and doling out their emergency bookwork, because nobody expected a sub to have any skills at all. “And, anyway, lots of stuff that I’m not using at the moment because all I do is say, ‘Your assignment’s on the board. Ask me if you have any questions.’ But see?” He gestured widely to blustery wind along the breakers. No power lines, no buildings, just sand and sea and a surprisingly small number of people, considering how clear the day was. “It’s perfect. This baby can finally get some air time and fly!”

He turned and realized Kenny was, well, really close. His eyes—the pretty blue ones that Will had first noticed—were focused on his face like Will was being really wise, and in that moment Will felt fearless and important.

And turned-on.

In fact, he hadn’t been this turned-on since Kenny had fallen asleep in his arms after Will had accidentally gotten him drunk. Oh man—Kenny was close enough for Will to feel his body heat now, but that night, when he was just warm and limp and powerful, leaning against his body….

Will was getting a stiffy.

He smiled gamely at Kenny and resisted the urge to close the gap between them—but oh man. Kenny’s mouth was parted, and Will… he lowered his head slowly, forgetting about the kite in his hands, and then a gust of wind caught the rolled-up rice-paper tail and sent it flipping around the two of them. Will jerked his arms up to give it room so it didn’t get tangled, and Kenny took a quick step back.

Well, damn.

But the kite tail was floating in the wind, and the little square frameless box kite was jerking in time. Will caught the spool of string before it could flip onto the sand, and let out about six feet of slack. The kite wove above them for a minute, and Will turned to Kenny with a grin, hoping his disappointment wouldn’t show.

“Here—hold it for a sec. I’ll take off my shoes and we can run down near the surf.”

Kenny had worn flip-flops, which he kept on, but he held out his hands and Will took off his tennis shoes and socks, liking the texture of the sand between his toes. He grinned up at Kenny again and realized that Kenny was sort of fixating on Will’s feet and calves, and he wondered if he had some deformity his mother had never told him about.

“Your legs are getting really defined,” Kenny said out of the blue. “All that bike riding you’re doing.”

Oh yeah. Will shrugged, mostly to hide a blush. “I’m sort of loving the flexibility of working from home,” he admitted. “Lots more physical activity—here, give me, and you don’t have to—” He reached out again for the kite.

Kenny pulled back. “No! I want to fly it!” He unspooled some more string and the thing really took off. He had this smile, sort of an expression of absolute joy on his face that told Will that no, Will really wasn’t a doofus and Kenny
wasn’t
doing this to humor him. Will was doing something that made his friend happy.

And anything beyond friends? Well, that would have to wait—until
both
of them were ready for the fallout.

Still, that didn’t stop Will from hanging back and watching as Kenny took the kite and went trotting quickly across the sand, the kite dancing overhead in his wake. His body was lithe and tight. Will had seen him in his underwear, and brother, did that muscular little body stand up to the exposure. Small muscles, defined, and a nice patch of neatly trimmed chest hair. Will didn’t have a lot of body hair himself, but he sure did appreciate it on Kenny.