Shiny! (20 page)

The thought made Will’s stomach a little squirmy and his chest ache a little too much, so when he got Kenny’s text that said,
Have mom drop you off at the gym. Let’s go swimming!
he was more than ready to accept it as a sign of kismet.

Kenny had read his mind from across town. Will was going to have to put his restless thoughts to bed and hope for the best.

W
ILL
’
S
MOM
was happy to throw his bike in the back of the car and drop him at the gym, and the swim was
great
. They stayed in the water, just talking, until the shadows grew long and the mosquitoes threatened to devour them whole as an appetizer, and then they put the bike on the rack of the tiny smart car and went back to Kenny’s house, where they spent all their weekends.

They had salads for dinner and then spent a long, glorious,
productive
evening meshing their imaginations on their project. While Will was waiting for Kenny to draw, he caught up on his web clients, and Kenny looked over his shoulder approvingly.

“Business is growing,” he said, sounding smug, and Will nodded.

“It’s getting there.” But not fast enough. He didn’t want to tell Kenny that, because he spent most of his nights at Kenny’s house. God, hadn’t Gif been a freeloader enough? That was the
last
thing he wanted Kenny to think.

“So, ready to get off the teaching train yet?” Kenny asked hopefully.

Will gave an inelegant little snort. “Hardly. In fact”—and he checked his e-mail—“I’ve got a few interviews lined up in the last week of July.”

“Now? Don’t schools around here start two weeks into August?”

Will looked from his computer to where Kenny sat, his adorable little hooked nose wrinkled in disbelief. Will nodded and reached out and touched his finger to the end of it, just because he could.

“Well,
yeah,
” he said, grinning. “I’m
lucky
,
because usually they don’t interview until a week before. God forbid we hire anyone before, like, the first day of school, right?”

“Ugh, that’s vile. They don’t do that in my mom’s school district.”

Yeah. Davis. Davis had a lot more money than any of the school districts Will had applied to. “Well, in Davis they have a more solid tax base,” Will told him, although he was pretty sure it was something Kenny already knew.

Kenny yawned and stretched. “I don’t want to talk about school right now,” he said plaintively. “It’s been too good a night and we’ve gotten too much done. Do you want to start working on the website tomorrow?”

Wow. This was really happening. They were really going to do this!

“Absolutely! But maybe first, we finish one more chapter.”

They got to bed late—past one in the morning, and Will, for one, was damned tired. In the dark, Kenny snuggled up to him and they kissed warmly, but Will’s eyes fell closed, and Kenny tucked against his shoulder, and they fell asleep soon after that.

T
HEY
SPENT
the whole next day together, just like they had the month prior, but this time, Will listened.

He said “I love you” three times that day.

Kenny didn’t say it once.

It wasn’t a reason to pout or to end the relationship or even to argue.

But it did leave Will wondering when the other shoe was going to drop off the dresser to under the bed, and if he’d notice when it did.

T
HE
SONG
changed. “I Promise You I Will” by Depeche Mode came on, and a breeze flirted over the tops of the wedding crowd.

“Mm,” Kenny sighed, and Will settled into the dance some more.

“You like the song?”

“I promise you, I promise you….” Kenny sang, and Will thought that yes, one way or another, Kenny had made promises and kept them.

Because Sad

“M
OMMM
,” K
ENNY
complained, but he really wasn’t arguing
that
hard.

“Kenny, your brother is coming home in two weeks. It would be great if you could visit.”

“Great for whom?” Kenny asked drily, and his mother blew out a breath.

“Well, great for me, for one,” she said, the science-teacher steel in her voice unbending enough for Kenny to hear that yes, she did realize that Joey could be a complete prick, and no, there wasn’t much she could do about it.

Kenny had come out of the closet when he was twelve years old, fully expecting his very liberal parents to be completely on his side.

And they had been.

His older brother, Joey, who’d already been in the ROTC and primed to join the army as soon as he left high school?

Joey had a fit.

Of course, it had been in the height of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, and suddenly Joey had this… this…
undesirable
right there in his own family. Their parents had been all PFLAG and gay rights and “Taste the Rainbow,” and Joey had been, “If someone tries to bash you, don’t expect me to fucking help.”

Of course it was
Davis
,
which was like a liberal oasis in the Republican desert that was
Sacramento, so Kenny could have been revered as an iconic god. He’d sort of shrugged
that
burden aside, of course, because seriously, who the hell wanted
that
to hang around his neck through high school? But he
had
been allowed to sort of snark in peace, and that was all he’d really desired out of his formative years.

And if he missed the days when he and Joey used to build blanket forts and make big project cards for their mother for Mother’s Day, well, Hawaii was a long way away, and Kenny never had to visit and be reminded that Joey wasn’t ever going to do that with him again. Small price to pay, really, for his sweet little house in the shitty suburb and the sweet guy who came to visit five nights out of seven.

Although Kenny was really starting to miss him on the two nights he wasn’t there.

“So, are you coming to visit?” his mom asked, and Kenny let out a sigh.

“Yeah.”

“Are you bringing Gif?”

Oh shit.

“Gif and I broke up at the beginning of May,” he told her, checking under the foil to see if their dinner was getting close to done, and cringing. In spite of the early August heat, he was making pot roast with all the fixings. Yeah, he was cranking the AC especially high today, but dammit, sometimes a guy just got tired of salad.

Besides, for all that Will was nice about the salads, Kenny had seen the fast-food containers in the bottom of his backpack, and he was pretty sure Will stopped at McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich on the way home, which meant that sometimes the big guy needed something a little more substantial to keep his strength up. Kenny had no problems cooking for his man if that was what it took to help him keep his strength (among other things) emphatically up.

“Kenny! That’s three months ago! You couldn’t have told us then?”

Oh God. After watching Will’s sweet—and yet weirdly autonomous—devotion to his mother, he felt like a first-class heel. It wasn’t his
mother’s
fault Joey was a prime prick who had tried to make Kenny feel like his gayness—and his choice of profession—made him a prize-winning loser. Besides, that was probably just something brothers did to you, right?

“Well, he wasn’t that important to me in the first place,” Kenny said, holding Will close to his mental vest for some reason. “I’ll let you know when I find someone who won’t leave when the shiny is gone.”

“Kenny—”

“Gotta go, Mom, the roast is burning—”

“That’s a blatant fabrication and you know it!”

“Bye!”

Kenny hit End Call, leaned against the counter, and sighed. God, his mom deserved a better son. In fact, she deserved someone like Will.

Hell.
Kenny
deserved someone like Will. Wouldn’t it be great if Kenny could trust, for once and for all, that they’d both have him for a while?

W
ILL
SHOWED
up a little late, and Kenny had plenty of time to talk himself into the whole “Will, do you want to meet my perfectly nice parents and my douche-bag big brother?” thing before he heard the car in the driveway. Kenny was wondering why he hadn’t ridden his bike when he saw the man of his dreams slogging from the big brown-purple land yacht to the porch, wearing an off-season corduroy suit with a hideous avocado tie.

He was smiling tentatively, and he had a bottle of white wine, which Kenny particularly liked, and he came through the door so bursting with beginning-of-August heat that Kenny started sweating the minute his foot hit the floor.

“You’re late, and oh my
God
!” He took the bottle of wine and set it in the fridge, nagging all the way. “Go change! Go shower! It’s 108 out there—go do something besides hang out in my house in that suit and drive up the temperature!”

Will laughed, and Kenny followed him down the hall to dig out the sleep shorts and T-shirt Will had left that week. They’d just been washed, and Kenny had started a drawer for him so Will could leave a toothbrush and anything else he might want right there within fingertips’ reach.

“Go jump in the shower,” Kenny admonished as Will shed the sport coat with the faded leather patches at the elbows. “My God, where were you? Was it like a….” Oh God. Will had said he might have a few this summer. “Was it a job interview?” he asked, praying it hadn’t been.

Will beamed at him. “Yeah! I got the job too, which was fortunate, because I was about to have to move in with my mother.”

“You got the job?” Kenny almost wailed, and Will shucked his boxers as quickly as he could, seeing as they got stuck on the sweat around his thighs.

“Well, yeah—you don’t sound happy?”

“You… I mean, you’re almost done with the website. Are you going to have time to do that?”
Way to go, Kenny. Way to sound like a self-involved douche when that’s not the real reason you don’t want him to have that job, and you know it!

Will grimaced. “Man, it’s gonna have to go on the back burner—I’m sorry. But I’ve got all those other clients—I mean, it’s going to be almost like two full-time jobs for a while. I’m so—”

“Don’t be sorry,” Kenny snapped, setting that horrible, sweaty, bulky, disgusting, gross shackle of a corduroy suit on the hanger. “Just don’t take the job. You’ve worked so hard these last three months building clients, getting our own site started. Why can’t you just do that?”

Will sighed and walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The stupid Neanderthal didn’t even wait for the hot water to come out, he just stepped into it cold, whooped like a mountain man, used Kenny’s soap quickly in all his private places and on his hair, and jumped out as soon as the rinsing was done. Kenny hung the suit up on the side of the bedroom door so it could air out, and then waited for him like a goober because… because this entire idea
hurt
him.

When Will came out, he was wrapped in a towel, just like the time—the first time—they’d done the thing, the big thing, with the other thing. It was weird. Kenny couldn’t think “sex toy” anymore, because as much fun as he and Will had in bed, none of it seemed to be playing around.

Kenny looked at him now and realized that this wasn’t playing around either. This wasn’t Gif signing up for extra shifts because he needed the money and the elderly people in the home he worked for didn’t care if he was crankier than they were. This was Will, and he took this job seriously, and Kenny needed to be honest.

He’d learned so much about Will in the past three months. It was time to show he’d done his homework.

He walked into Will’s space, liking the cool feel that came off his skin after the shower, and placed a gentle kiss on a pale shoulder. He thought if Will was a sun worshipper, he’d probably have freckles, but he wasn’t. Classic farmer’s tan. Kenny liked the paleness—it was secret skin, just for Kenny, the same way Will’s powerhouse sexuality was just for Kenny too. Only Kenny had been bent over the bed and pounded into the mattress, and only Kenny had tasted Will’s semen, bursting into his mouth while sunshine poured over Will’s naked body like a blessing.

And only Kenny knew how tender, how open Will’s heart really was, and why this was a really bad idea.

“Will? Baby? Maybe, for you, the teaching thing is sort of no bueno.”

Will laughed. “Kenny? Baby? I have the teaching certificate and everything. I mean, I’m
good
at it. I love grade-schoolers!” Will’s lopsided smile was goofy and true. “You know, the stupid jokes, the excitement about everything. It’s my peer group!”

Kenny laughed because that was the Gospel of Will right there—he really was an overgrown fifth grader, in the best sense of the word. And that was going to kill him.

Kenny tried really hard not to feel like shit, because besides being Will’s first sex, he was going to have to be Will’s first broken heart—in this, at least. “Will, you know how you liked Harry Potter and you shared?”

Will nodded and put his hands on Kenny’s waist, probably because he just liked to touch. “Well, yeah. But this is public school. They don’t care if the kids are reading porn as long as they’re reading, you know!” He paused and giggled. “Not that I’d, you know, teach porn.”

Kenny grimaced. “They don’t care if the kids are reading
het
porn, sweetheart. And that’s the problem.”

Will blinked at him owlishly. “What? I mean, the porn thing was only a joke—”

“Yeah, but the gay thing isn’t. And you’re gay. And all you have to do, just once, is mention your boyfriend, and it doesn’t even have to be to a kid. It could be to another teacher, and a kid hears. And if you talk about ‘your friend Kenny’ too much, people are going to suspect, and if anyone asks you, what are you going to say?”

Will’s face grew hurt and shuttered. “I’ll say it’s none of their business,” he said, but he sounded angry and defensive, even to Kenny.