Shiny! (9 page)

“Yeah. Aunt Cara’s something else. She’s one of those women who just… like, when I was telling her I wanted to get my teaching credential, she was like, ‘They’ll chew you up and spit you out—and then you’ll conquer them like a champion. It’ll be fucking glorious. I want a ticket to that show!’”

“Did they?” Kenny asked, suddenly captivated. “I used to be
horrible
to my teachers.”

“Well, yeah!” Will nodded. “I mean, I’m a walking fifth-grade joke, right? I knew that going in. But it was worth it. Once they knew me, most of the kids jumped right on board. Sometimes you just need a someone to tell you you’re doing a good job, even if it’s a big goofy someone who tends to sit in gum.”

“They put gum on your chair?”

Will sighed. “I went through a lot of cords in my first year, yeah.”

Kenny felt an absurd little wound. “You knew? You knew it would be hard before you did it?”

“Oh yeah!” Will looked surprised. “You’ve never done anything that you knew was going to be hard but worth it?”

“No,” Kenny said, abruptly tired. He looked at Will’s computer again. “No. But your web designs are worth it. Are you going to go back to teaching?”

“Hmm….” Will closed his laptop again and put it into the case on the floor. Princess was sprawled next to it, trying to be a big fluffy pain in the ass, and without a hello or how are you, Will picked her up. Kenny was about to caution him, because she was sort of a diva, but before he could say anything, the cat was sprawled on his chest, licking his face. Bitch. He’d had fantasies….

“That wasn’t an answer,” Kenny said, pulling his drunken brain out of the pickle jar.

“I was just thinking,” Will said, sighing softly. “I have a sub job tomorrow in the Grant district. I’ve got to remember to put on my armor, you know? The last time I subbed a middle school there, I caught a math book in the face.”

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

Will pulled back a grimace. “Well, you know, not everyone’s a nice guy, Kenny. Not everyone is you.”

“I’m not that nice,” Kenny said helplessly, because he wasn’t. Inside, he was hoping Will never got another teaching job, because he thought Will should put all his talent somewhere else, and given Will had just told him he really loved the job, that wasn’t nice at all.

“You’re awesome,” Will said sincerely. “Do you want to watch some TV?”

Kenny let out an absurd little whimper. “Can, uhm… you wouldn’t mind if I snuggled, would you?”

With a shrug, Will opened himself up on the couch. “Yeah. You won’t offend me. Knock yourself out.”

Kenny grabbed the remote and started searching for the Syfy channel, and took up that extended arm. God. A het guy who liked to snuggle. He was totally wasted on women like whatserface, Kenny was sure of it.

As he let his eyes glaze over and his head loll on Will’s shoulder, he was also sure that he had to do something really nice for this big guy who just seemed to want to make the world a better place.

“Come over Wednesday,” he slurred. “We’ll spend more time on the graphic novel, less time drinking.”

He heard an extremely masculine grunt. “That there’s a deal,” Will said, and Kenny decided it could be his best breakup ever.

“S
O
THAT
’
S
what you were doing when I saw you last May,” Cara said thoughtfully, and Kenny grimaced.

“You must have seen Will then—because you and I didn’t meet until—”

“Oh yeah.” Cara crinkled her freckled nose. “So, Will—why didn’t you tell him?”

Will looked away. “Well, you know. I just barely knew myself. Besides—I mean, I may have sort of fallen for him at first sight, but I’m slow. It took me a while to figure out what first sight really was.”

“Yeah, Cara,” Nina said archly. “Sometimes it takes someone a while to realize what first sight really is!”

Cara rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah… you were sneaky.”

Kenny strangled a laugh. “Will is anything but sneaky. He was just clueless!”

“That’s not true!” Will protested. The music had resumed, and for a moment he watched Ashley being whirled around by what looked to be an older cousin, and he envied her. He wasn’t great at it, but he and Kenny had at least learned to dance. “I knew exactly what I was doing,” he said with dignity, and Kenny raised an eyebrow in disbelief.

“And what’s that, precious?”

Will grinned proudly. “I was making myself
indispensable.
”

And in that moment, Kenny’s smirky front fell away, and what was left was what Will thought of as the real Kenny. He was funny, yes, but he was also the same guy who cried at weddings.

“Oh,” he said, sounding poleaxed. “Well, consider yourself ‘mission accomplished.’”

Will grabbed his hand, too conscious of Kenny’s vulnerability to even take advantage and keep making fun. “Well, you know. I do have a good idea every now and then.”

Confessions and Confusions

I
T
WAS
sort of embarrassing to admit it, but Will’s mommy was still his best friend—although after two weeks of visiting Kenny a couple of times a week, he thought maybe Kenny was starting to outrank her.

Will mowed his mommy’s lawn every weekend. She’d never asked him to, but after his father had passed away, it became his job, and after he’d moved out, he’d continued to do it. She wasn’t there all the time—in fact, she had enough volunteer projects that she was there maybe half the time—but when she
was
there, they often had lunch or went shopping or sometimes just sat and chatted, with no excuse needed whatsoever.

This Saturday was no exception to the lawn-mowing—or wouldn’t have been if Sacramento wasn’t having some bizarre, unprecedented three days’ worth of muggy, icky rain in the middle of the weekend. Will was sort of depressed; he’d told Kenny he’d be over Sunday to mow his lawn too—he’d done it for the last two weeks, ever since Kenny’s little “oopsie, I’m so
drunk
” episode. Kenny had cried on him that night. Even though Will had made plans to sleep over in case
he’d
gotten drunk, he’d changed his mind at the last moment because Kenny had seemed to need it so badly. The next morning… well, Will hadn’t wanted to just ditch out on the guy. So he’d cooked breakfast, and made himself domestic, and talked to his new bestie some more.

And now Kenny’s lawn needed mowing again, and even if it didn’t, Will would need to find another reason to go. Kenny had gone in for his blood test this week, just to make sure Gif hadn’t left him any nasty bugs Kenny hadn’t been planning on, and Will thought he might like the moral support, but Will didn’t want to seem like creepy guy who was always over either.

It was a delicate line to walk for someone who wasn’t used to delicacy, really. But still, Will’s standing appointment with his mother was not yielding so Will could waffle and flip-flop about Kenny.

Besides, although his mom
was
busy today, his aunt Cara was hanging out, watching her DVR, and the two of them sat down for lunch. This put a dash of awesome in Will’s day, because Cara was hands down one of Will’s favorite people.

He wasn’t sure why he and Cara had always seemed to hit it off so well. He had clear memories of Cara just stopping by his house when he was a kid and saying, “You want to come play in the dirt with me?” And Will had gone. She’d always been working places where he could sit and play and tell stories to himself for hours, and unlike his father, who had wanted a better accounting of Will’s time than that (football, track, starting his own business—
anything
was better than sitting around dreaming!), Cara thought there was nothing untoward about a little boy who liked to sing and play in the dirt.

And Cara had always seemed to make Will’s
mom
happy. Whenever Anne Lafferty had gotten too grim, or too sad, or too stifled, living up to the many rules James Lafferty couldn’t seem to live without, Cara would come over, grab Anne by the hand, and pull her and Will into an adventure. He remembered a summer Saturday that had ended up at the seashore simply because Cara had driven by and hauled the two of them outside and into her battered brown minivan. (She had a more recent model of that same car now—it was blue, but it was still beat to hell. Playing nice with her cars was not a virtue Cara had ever entertained.) In fact, he remembered a
lot
of things his mom and Cara had done on the spur of the moment, when his father had
never
believed in the spur of the moment. Although Will never suspected that his mother might not have been happy with his father (in fact, he was pretty sure they loved each other a
lot
), he did
suspect that part of the reason his mom had been able to make that happiness stick, in spite of what seemed to be a whole lot of differences in personality, was Cara Dempsey.

So it was a gift to sit with Cara and eat in front of the television. One of Cara’s passions was reality television shows, including the one they were watching, which featured guys in competing food trucks.

“Oh, gross,” Cara said, tucking into a really amazing sub sandwich Will’s mom had bought. Will’s mom would do that—she knew Cara would be there since Cara didn’t have cable, and she knew Will would be there, so she left a note saying food was in the fridge. It was sort of amazing, especially given that since his father had passed away, his mother didn’t cook unless she really had to. In a way, Will wished she’d tell him to bring his own damned food, but he also knew she didn’t mind entertaining.

“The sandwich?” Will asked after swallowing his bite, and Cara laughed, shaking her graying hair out of her face. She was actually only a few years younger than Will’s mom, so in her midforties, but she wasn’t a fan of hair dyes or makeup or anything artificial. That was okay—Will sort of loved her without all that.

“No, silly boy—the thing they’re making on the show! Ew. Can you imagine trying to sell that?”

Will looked and shrugged. “I cook for myself all the time, Aunt Cara—I’m thinking I usually make worse than that.”

Cara laughed. “Yeah, well, as long as you cook. I’m starting to think ‘homemade’ is anything not made at McDonald’s.”

Will laughed and took another heavenly bite. God—who didn’t love Mr. Pickles? Especially when his mom was buying!

“Kenny likes it,” he conceded.

Cara—whom he hadn’t seen in a while—wrinkled her freckled nose. “Who’s Kenny? He sounds like some kid you’d get in trouble for hanging around. Like that Jenkins kid who kept egging houses and blaming it on you!”

“Yeah, but me and Pete Jenkins were never friends,” Will said, shuddering. God, Pete Jenkins—
there
was a reason to run fleeing through middle school. His favorite game had been to get behind Will and kick his back foot so Will would go sprawling. A lot of really average homework had gotten lost when that had happened. Talk about
gross
! “Kenny’s a good guy,” Will said stoutly, hoping the memory of a really good friend could make him forget middle school for the moment. “We’re working on a graphic novel together.”

“Yeah?” Cara perked up. She didn’t have any particular artistic skills herself—except her skill with plants and gardening—but she did enjoy
looking
at art or visiting artists. Her house was filled to clutter with handcrafted wind chimes and hand-woven throws—she just appreciated the hell out of anything that involved a combination of imagination and regular household items.

“Yeah,” Will said, feeling proud. “I mean, all I’m doing right now is subbing, and that goes away in June—”

“What about your web business?” Cara asked, and Will shrugged.

“It’s been picking up. Oh, wait, here—” Will reached into his pocket and fumbled with his wallet. He produced one of the clever little business cards Kenny had made for him, with the computer that looked like a souped-up jalopy, complete with pinstripe and flames. “He got me a bunch of them, and I’ve handed them out. But it’s weird. It’s like, people I’ve never heard of keep calling me up because they’ve seen my business card. I’ve gotten three new clients!”

Cara looked at the card, her eyebrows arching in what Will thought was probably approval. “He made these for you?”

Will looked at the little card fondly. It had been really sweet, actually. Kenny had just thrown them on the coffee table and told him to take them, and then had sort of waved off Will’s thanks.

“Yeah. See, I met him when he was breaking up with his boyfriend—”

Aunt Cara didn’t say anything. She just looked up at Will as though he’d left a word out of a sentence.

Will flushed.

“Did, uhm, Mom tell you?”

Cara shook her head no. “Not in so many words. But she did tell me we should stop trying to pimp you out to my assistant. Was there anything
you
wanted to tell me, young William whom I love like a son?”

This was so much harder when he wasn’t coming off the high of a three-hour masturbation bender. “I, well, I’m gay.”

“All righty, then. So you’re gay. Good to know. I’ve got some guys I can set you up with too.”

Will’s grin blossomed, slow and then wider and wider. “Not yet,” he said, thinking that dating a guy would probably be just as awkward as dating a girl. “I’m sort of getting used to being in my own skin.”

He was, actually, and it was
amazing.
He masturbated twice a day, three times on days he didn’t see Kenny, and he’d watched every free Internet gay porn site available. Some of it was icky, some of it was creepy, and some of it was so damned hot he watched it twice. Oh. My. God. How could he have
had
a cock for twenty-eight years and never known that they were the best playground equipment known to man?

Cara tilted her head at him, smiling a little. “What’s that like?” she asked, and she sounded like she really wanted to know for herself.

“It’s… it’s good,” he said inadequately. It wasn’t just the masturbation either. “It’s like, like I know what I want. I used to look at girls and not feel anything and wonder what was wrong with me. Now I look at guys and I
want
them, and I feel like
nothing’s
wrong with me, I’m
great
.”