The Worst Best Luck (2 page)

And worst of all, the part that killed him, was that great smile, like a blast of sunshine on a cloudy day. 

Matt pushed his hair off of his face with a sweep of his big hand.  “Hey, you must be Peter.  Kyle called this morning and said you’d be coming.”

Normally Peter would have rolled his eyes, thinking about Kyle’s presumptuousness in scheduling his errand before asking him.  But Matt had him floored.  Sure, mechanics were hot, inherently, and usually had decent bods like most people who didn’t sit at a desk all day.  But Matt had  something…magical.  He didn’t look like those models Peter had just seen; he looked…better.  That face…that smile…

“Yeah I um that’s me.”

Matt blinked, then the corner of his mouth turned out – not up, in a smirk, but sideways, and Peter knew he’d been “caught looking.”

But more than that – it was a look that said, “Let’s fuck!”
Peter thought, his insides relocating their blood to his groin. 
Could this guy, this gorgeous butch dude, be gay?  And into me? 

No, stupid.  He sees that you’re hot for him and it amuses him.  Get over yourself.

“I’m Matt,” he said, extending his hand.  Peter reached to shake it and Matt retracted it.  “Oh, sorry, I should wipe it off first.”

No,
Peter thought,
I want to take your hot dirty greasy hand and run home and use that same hand to beat off with. 

“No problem,” Peter said regretfully as Matt pulled a wipe out of a yellow plastic container labeled GOJO.  He kept smiling at Peter as he cleaned his hands, and Peter smiled back, thinking he must look like a crazy person as he did. 

“Now I can shake your hand.”  Matt’s hand was like a shock to Peter’s system, strong and hot, and was that just a Dr. Lecter-ish caress of his fingertip as he let go?

“You okay?” Matt asked, still smiling.  “Because you don’t look so good.”

“Oh!  Sorry.  I just…” 
Fuck it! 
He thought.  “You are so amazingly handsome.  And I’m just saying that,” he babbled hastily, “because I work in advertising, well, not really but I work in an advertising agency, and I see good looking guys or at least pictures of them all day and…”

“Takes one to know one!” Matt replied, and it took Peter a moment to process it.

“Oh, I get it.  Because you think I’m…” 
No, of course not, think, dammit.  That’s not what he…

“Yep!  You know what you’re doing Friday night?”

“Um, not yet.”  Hanging out with Katie, he thought, same as always, probably binge viewing some TV.

“Yeah you do,” Matt said, his eyes telling Peter something, something deep, something…crazy and wrong, because what they were saying was,
I like you, I want you.
 

“You’re going out with me,” Matt said, just like you’d say, you’re going to work today. 

Peter laughed.  “I’m going out with you?”

“That’s right!”

“Okay!”  They stood there, laughing, Matt in pleasure and Peter in shock.  Peter could hardly, could not, believe his luck. 
This doesn’t happen to YOU.  This happens to other people.  Better looking, confident, happy people. 

But it was happening, it did happen.  Then it occurred to him. 
Don’t worry, it’s all bullshit, he’ll blow you off, another flake who won’t even call to cancel, just…won’t show up.
  The thought cheered him, freed him from fear.  Yep, everything would happen exactly as he’d foreseen!

“Well, I have to get back to work now.  Do I need to sign anything or…?”

“No, Kyle’s on file.  Tell him I’ll give him a call tomorrow and let him know what the damage is to Miss Yvonne.”

“Will do.  Well…it’s nice to meet you.”

“You too.  See you tomorrow night.  Oh, yeah, I need your number.”

“Right!  Duh, huh?” Matt handed Peter a clipboard and he wrote it down on a scrap of paper.  “Okay, then.”

“Okay, man.  Have a great rest of your day.”

“You too.”

Peter walked out of the garage looking as if he’d been hit by a truck, at least, if the truck was made of marshmallows and sunshine.  He’d been single for so long now, hadn’t been laid in…wow, you could almost count it in years and not months, pretty soon.  Not since Cody had…

Oh fuck that!
  He thought with a smile, banishing the bad memory.  If anyone could lay the memory of the Worst Boyfriend Ever to rest, Matt would be the one to do it, Peter would bet on it. 

Yeah, but he’d have to be the Best Sex Ever too, wouldn’t he
, a little voice said inside him,
if he was gonna make you forget that part about Cody.

Still.  Some part of him, some part that hadn’t been entirely beat down, wanted to believe.  Wanted to live this fantasy as if it was real, if only until Friday night, when it would fall apart. 
Just let me have a few days, thinking about that face, that smile…

He stopped in a deli to pick up a sandwich before grabbing a cab back to work.  The paper’s headline screamed at him from its eye level perch. 
JACKPOT RIOT!  Twelve injured in melee over empty machine!
 

He’d seen the story on NY1 – the Quadrillions lottery jackpot was up to $600 million at the last drawing, and a ticket machine at a bodega in Queens had run out of paper, with nearly a hundred people left in line a half hour before the drawing.  He shook his head, thinking about it – imagine getting your arm broken because you were mad that you couldn’t throw your money away fast enough.

“And they all got hurt or arrested for nothin’, too,” the guy behind the counter said, seeing Peter’s look of disbelief.  “Nobody won last night anyway.  It’s up to $700 million now.  Biggest jackpot ever.”

“In the US,” his co-worker said, wrapping up Peter’s sandwich.  “Bigger ones in Europe before.”

“But those get split by design.”  Everyone was suddenly an expert on lottery history these days.  “This could all go to one guy.”  He held Peter’s change out, a smile on his face as he held back a dollar.  “Could be your lucky day.”

Peter laughed.  It was his lucky day, wasn’t it?  He’d met Matt, had at least had a moment of flirtation for the first time in a long time.  And he’d made an easy hundred bucks in the process.  Wouldn’t it be just wrong to ignore that?

“Okay, fine.  One quick pick.” 

“You got it buddy.  Good luck.”

“You’ll need it,” the lady behind him grumbled, hands full of tickets filled in by hand with numbers she’d painstakingly chosen.  “Quick picks don’t win jackpots.”

“We’ll see,” Peter laughed, folding the ticket and stuffing it in the back of his wallet.  If he could meet a guy like Matt, and go on a date with him, just like that?  Anything was possible.

Dreeep
! went the sound of Jose’s drill. 
Dreep dreep
! responded Lenny’s. 

Then all the drills in chorus,
dreeep dreep dreep!
Then silence. Then six voices all together.  “OH YEAH! BONE IN!”
Dreep dreep dreep dreep dreep!

“Yeah baby!”

“Harder!”

Matt bent over laughing, holding his gut.  “You sick fuckers.”

“You’re gonna drill that ass, we know it, man,” Jose said, putting his drill down to high-five Ricardo.  “You like the man beef, we know that, dude, it’s all good.”

Ricardo turned to high five Matt.  “Bone in!  No meatless Friday for you, man!”

“Rump roast!”

Dreep dreep!

Matt was grinning from ear to ear, but then, that was the state of his face most of the time now.  And why not?  He had good friends, he had a great job, he had his health, a reliable paycheck, a decent apartment in a quiet building, and now, if his luck held, he was gonna spend Friday night deep inside an amazingly hot piece of ass. 

Take it slow
, he told himself. 
Don’t jump in.
 

Fuck that
! his cock replied. 
Dreep dreep!

Matt shook his head and went to the office.  Time to get his focus back.  Take a leak, take a break, check your phone, take a little walk, get a sandwich – shit, it’s lunch time!  He couldn’t believe how fast the morning had flown by.  He got in at 7 and here it was 12:30.  No wonder he had to piss.

He took a few deep breaths as he held his dick at the urinal, trying to relax.  It had gotten semi-hard in seconds, just from thinking about pulling it out on Friday and sticking it in Peter’s mouth. 
I hope it’s not too big for him,
he thought.  Which rarely happened, because who hates a huge cock, right? 
But it was a man’s job, taking a big dick,
he thought, mouth curling up in a grin again. 
Not everyone’s up to it
.

But there’d been something about Peter, something that Matt knew when he saw it.  Peter was one of those ostensibly mild-looking types, on the surface – like the actors Edward Norton or Tobey Maguire, nice boys, you’d think…unless you looked in their eyes, not at their floppy hair and their puppy dog faces. 

Then you could see the darkness, then you could see “The Perv” as Matt called it.  Peter had been checking him out hard, scoping his body, and the way his pupils dilated when Matt shook his hand – yep.  Perv!  Awesome!

He’d been a shy boy, too.  Awkward, and with that…folded-in thing guys got sometimes when Matt hit on them, as if retreating from a blow when all he wanted to do was give a caress.  And yeah, that got Matt hot, too – the thought of gettin’ down in that flower like a bee, ready to pollinate, watching the shy boy open up and spread his petals…
Fuck!  I’m gonna have to beat off three times tonight before I can get to sleep.

And smart, too – that was a lot of the appeal of shyness to Matt, how often it concealed a blazing intellect.  It was rare to find someone shy who was stupid; stupid people didn’t think enough to be self-conscious.  Fuck, he loved a big brain…

Back to work, dammit.  He checked his phone, smiled at a text from his friend Chadrick, made his coffee up right and took it back to his bay.  Then he put his earbuds back in and flipped through the songs on the iPod.  He kept his music on a separate device from his phone, because he didn’t want the distraction of calls or texts while he was In The Zone. 

Some Bach
, he thought. 
Something precise.
  Not the cello pieces; those were too warm and soft right now.  Something metallic, something to dampen the sexual flames, get his head straight. 
Harpsichord concertos,
he decided.

Bach’s Italian Concerto began to ring out in his ears, the rest of the sounds around him gone, blocked or filtered.  His face had what an observer might think was a blank stare, as he looked at the engine in front of him, and started to reassemble the pieces of the puzzle in his mind into the form they’d been in before Peter had shown up. 

He used the diagnostic computer for the things you couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, the parts of the car beyond the senses, managed by firmware on circuit boards.  This old girl didn’t have any electronics, which suited Matt just fine. 

He knew when it was time to take the earbuds out, start the car, listen to the engine, and hear the music.  Because it was music, and Matt was a conductor, and the parts of the engine were the performers.  The designer of the engine was the composer, but it was up to the conductor sometimes to take liberties with the piece, to change something here or there, put his own stamp on it. 

The car’s performance when he was done with it was
his
performance.  You could blindfold him and rev up four engines in four cars of the same make and model, and he could tell you which one he’d worked on.  His mentor, Terry, could even say what work was needed on the others, just from the sound – a skill Matt intended to master someday.

Of course an engine has many parts, and the engine that drove Matt’s brain had its own little circuit board, running its own program.  A program ignored by the main routine, but which nonetheless was busy planning a Friday night to remember.  Almost unconsciously Matt reached over and picked up a pen and wrote
bacon
on a piece of paper.  Because he’d be cooking one of his breakfast specialties for Peter late on a Saturday morning, after a long night of hard fucking…

Then his hands and mind were back in the machine, where they belonged, at least until the next piece of the plan came to him.

Peter had his own plan for Friday night.  He was going to show up at the theater, where Matt was meeting him at the movies at 7. 
Allegedly,
he told himself. 
He’ll blow you off, wait and see. 
Then he was going to go to Barnes and Noble and pick up a book for the weekend. 
Then I’m going to pick up a bottle of wine, come home, drink it all and hurl myself crying onto the couch
, he’d thought with a grin, only half meaning it. 
Drama queen!

Still, he was a wreck.  Some part of him knew that Matt wasn’t that guy, wasn’t the bullshitter who would cancel or worse, just not show. 
So then what?
 
What do I wear?  What kind of underwear do I want to be seen in, if it should come to that?  Which it won’t, but if you’re not prepared, well, that’s when it’ll happen of course… What do I eat now, so I don’t hog out at a late dinner and gross him out?  What if we get popcorn?  Do I have toothpicks so I can get any kernels out of my teeth?

And of course he had to worry about the money that a date would cost him.  Living in Manhattan without a huge paycheck was an adventure in living on the razor’s edge.  What if Matt wanted to go somewhere really nice?  Like, fifty bucks a person nice?  Peter was determined to hold up his own end of the expenses tonight, and that $100 bill from Kyle was now a life saver. 

Katie flipped through a magazine, an island of calm on his couch while he spun around the room.  “You’re overthinking it.  People do this, you know.  In fact, most single people in Manhattan go on dates on Friday nights.”

“You’re not going on a date,” he said accusingly, discovering a single horrifying hair on his earlobe, his nose nearly pressed to the mirror.

“I’m on sabbatical.”  Katie’s last boyfriend had turned out to be married, with a wife and family in Connecticut.  And another in New Jersey, which she’d learned while watching NY1, when Connecticut Wife tried to kill him with a pair of scissors in the middle of Grand Central Station.

“It’s futile, anyway.  He’s…God, Katie, he’s the most beautiful man.  I mean seriously.  Like unreal.  And it’s his smile, that’s what gets you.  Gets me.  It’s too good to be true.  A nice gorgeous single man who fixes things and lives in Manhattan.”

“If he was perfect, he wouldn’t be gay.”

“Well, maybe he has a twin.”

“Now
that’s
dreaming.”

Peter stood outside the IFC Theater on Avenue of the Americas, just another guy waiting for his date.  Matt had suggested seeing the restored version of the original “The Wicker Man,” with Christopher Lee.  Peter had been surprised, figuring that a mechanic would want to go see “Shit Blowin’ Up III” or something. 

That’s why you know he’s going to show up,
Peter laughed at his black dog, the voice that been telling him it would all go wrong. 
Nobody makes a blow-off date for an art house movie.

Then, there he was.  Peter saw Matt before Matt saw him.  He had on jeans, black boots, a black biker jacket, a New York Giants beanie keeping his hair behind his ears.  He had his “city face” on, neutral, flat, bland, don’t bother me…but then he saw Peter, and that smile broke out, that gleam in his eyes flashed, and it was like a Times Square billboard lighting up.

“Hey,” Matt said, giving Peter a hug.  Peter hugged him in return, felt the firm ridges of Matt’s back, a thought flashing in his mind
where you’d run your hands over his naked body if he had you on your back fucking the shit out of you
and then he turned that off, pulled back, tried to remember that he was Peter Rabbit, and this night wasn’t gonna go there.

Matt bought their tickets before Peter could say anything.  “Thanks,” he said as Matt handed him his ticket.

“My pleasure.”

“Snacks are on me,” Peter insisted.

Matt nodded.  “Cool.”  Peter forked out a ridiculous twenty bucks for popcorn and sodas. 

When they took their seats, Matt didn’t even ask.  He just threw his arm around Peter’s shoulders, all proprietary-like.  Peter was stunned, but delighted.  He kept his eyes straight ahead, but he could feel Matt’s eyes on him, checking to see if he was uncomfortable with it. 

Instead, Peter suddenly thought of the lottery ticket, the lucky day, and remembered the stupid Internet meme YOLO -
You only live once.
He shifted and snuggled into Matt’s chest. 
God, he’s a big one
, Peter thought.  Unlike Peter’s wire-thin runner’s body, Matt’s was
meaty.
  He could feel Matt’s big firm pectorals twitch and dance underneath him each time Matt shifted to eat some popcorn or sip his drink. 

And he was so
warm
.  It had been (he’d counted it up after meeting Matt) nine months since the last time he’d been with a man.  And Cody hadn’t been a cuddler, by any means.  Only when he had Peter pinned down in the middle of sex, or had wrestled him into the floor during the rough foreplay he liked, did Peter ever feel the warmth, the weight of him. 

“That was a crazy movie,” Matt said afterward.

“Yeah, huh?  Like batshit crazy.”

“Good though, right?”

“Yeah, oh yeah.”

To Peter’s relief, dinner was going to be at an old family restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen – not the kind of place they gouge you on the check.  They knew Matt by name in the little bistro, and gave them a table for two by the window.

The old Italian lady who owned the place came out and put her hand on Matt’s shoulder.  “So glad to see you bring a friend with you for once.  You eat alone too much.”  She winked at Peter, making sure everyone got the message.

Matt blushed, and waved her away with a smile.  He did eat alone too much.  Sex in the city was like candy on the street for a guy like Matt, just waiting to be picked up, but Matt didn’t pick it up.  Well, not anymore.  Somehow, since he’d left his old job, his old life, he hadn’t had an appetite for the meaningless sex, the hot, yet cold, encounters he’d used to block out his misery. 
Getting shitfaced and fucking strangers every weekend was what you did when you hated your life,
he thought now. 

He’d felt a strange calm since meeting Peter, as if something that had been unquiet, restless, tossing and turning, had finally been tucked in and had gone to sleep.  A disquiet he hadn’t really known was there, until it was gone. 
Crazy, right?
  he asked himself,
that you’d think that about someone you just met, someone you don’t really know.
  But some part of him felt that he
did
know, and it was an instinct he trusted.

And that was why he’d gone ahead and thrown his arm around Peter at the movies on the first date.  It just felt…meant to be.  It wasn’t anything he could remember feeling with a man, and yet it didn’t shock him.  Ever since he’d taken control of his own destiny a few years ago and defied the expectations set out for him, good things had happened one after the other.  It just made sense that living the life he was meant to live would result in meeting the guy he was supposed to meet.

“So,” Peter said after a glass of wine relaxed him, “a luxury car mechanic in Manhattan.  Good choice.”

Matt laughed.  “There’s definitely a market for the skill.”

“Did you always work on cars?”

“No,” Matt said, sipping his own wine, wanting to pace himself, knowing he had a lot of physical labor ahead tonight.  With luck.  “I used to work in an office.  Went to school, all that.”  He shrugged.  “Not my thing, though.  No offense.”

Peter threw his hands up in mock surrender.  “None taken.  Not my first choice, either, but…well, it pays better than working retail, or pulling coffees, or…anything else I could do.”

“So what’s your dream?  Your goal?”

Peter blushed now.  “It’s silly.  It won’t happen.  My own fault, though, because I won’t suffer for it.”

“Which is?”

“ ‘I wanna be a producer…’” Peter sang softly, and Matt smiled, getting the reference to “The Producers.” 

“Not necessarily of a big Broadway show,” he appended hastily.  “Just…theater.  New York theater, though, with the best and the brightest.”

“And what would you have to suffer to do that?”

“Poverty, and humiliation, degradation at the hands of some crazy rich producer, in order to learn the ropes.”  A shadow flitted over Peter’s face, a memory.

“Well, how did they learn the ropes?”

Peter laughed.  “Mostly?  By getting rich first, and
then
becoming Broadway producers!”

“So what’s the very best show out there right now?”

“ ‘Mr. Burns.’”

“As in, The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns.”

“Yeah.  Sort of.  It’s complicated.”  Peter paused, waited to see if Matt would shrug it off and change the subject.

Matt didn’t change his thoughtful, interested expression.  This happened sometimes.  He only noticed because it never happened before he threw away his old life, his old image.  It didn’t upset him…well, okay, it did.  This thing, this idea, that “office people” had – because you were a mechanic, because you worked with your hands, it was because you couldn’t work with your mind.  Why would you ever be a mechanic if you could work in an office?  You have a college degree, why are you doing
that?

So when a conversation turned in an intellectual direction, some people paused now, the way they never did when they knew he had a degree from Harvard in Comp Lit with a secondary in Philosopy.  They never paused when he worked as an analyst in a consulting firm, wearing a tie to work, a tie with which he wanted to hang himself by the end of most days.  Because then?  Of course you understand anything I’m about to say.  But now?  Well, it’s complicated, and you’re a mechanic, so maybe we should change the subject so I don’t embarrass you.

Peter looked into Matt’s eyes.  They were clear, bright,
intelligent.
  If he didn’t get it, he didn’t get it.  But even if the grounding, the reading, wasn’t there, the smarts were.  He’d get the gist of it anyway.  Peter decided to trust his instinct.

“Well, it’s set in three time frames.  In the first one, civilization’s just collapsed, and people are out in the woods, entertaining and comforting each other by sitting around the fire, telling old Simpsons episodes.  There’s no more electricity, so no more TV obviously.  So retelling the episodes is the only way to ‘see’ them again.  But you can see their memories are already shaky, that they’re losing some of the details.

“Then in the second act, it’s seven years later, and there are these minstrel troupes who put on ‘old times’ shows, mostly made up of old Simpsons episodes, or how they remember them now.  But they also reenact everything that used to be popular culture, it’s this mélange of music videos, and TV commercials too, because of course there’s this nostalgia for all the shit you can’t buy anymore, the whole world of consumer goods we took for granted when we had it.

“Then the third act is seventy years in the future, and we’re back in a pre-industrial society, and the Simpsons have become these…archetypes, gods, even, whose stories become transformed into passion plays.  In those plays, they’re killed, they die and ascend to heaven, but they still defeat evil in the form of Mr. Burns, who’s the Devil now, and Itchy and Scratchy are his demons…it’s…mind blowing. 

“And of course Bart is the trickster god, the Mercury, the Pan, all that.  And you can just see it coming true, like of course this is exactly what the future would look like if it all fell apart.”

Matt nodded.  “So they’re the new Homeric legends, so to speak.  And remember, they used to call the devil Old Scratch, so Itchy and Scratchy are perfect as demons.”

Peter laughed, delighted.  “Yes! Exactly!”

“Sounds fantastic.  I’d love to see it.”

“I’d love to see it again,” Peter said.  He felt ashamed, that he was surprised, ashamed that he’d thought Matt wouldn’t get it. 

“Well,” Matt smiled as the food arrived.  “We’ll have to make a night of it.”

Peter smiled.  “Yeah, that sounds good.”