by Amy Lane
Zep opened his mouth and closed it, his goofy surfer grin deserting him for once. “But why would he want to be my boyfriend? The dude’s rich and only has two years to go before he graduates!”
“Then what’s he doing working at Johnnies?” Curtis asked.
“I dunno. One day we were on the schedule together, and we just never split up after that,” Zep said, like that made perfect sense. His face fell. “I… you know. Assumed that’s why we were only fooling around. He’s got better dudes to do than me.”
“Not according to him!” Henry would have shaken him, but God, that black crap was all over his body. “Maybe he’s here because you’re the only dude he wants to do!”
“Oh God!” Now Zep was almost in tears. “What am I gonna do? I don’t want him to go off and do other dudes!”
“Well, first you wash that shit off your hands,” Henry told him. “Then go change. When he gets back, you ask him if he wants to move in and pay rent, and maybe you two can be exclusive so you can stop talking Curtis into your bed, where he feels like the third wheel.”
“Sorry, my man,” Zep said automatically.
“It was cutting into my studying,” Curtis said, a note of apology in his voice.
“Bummer.” Zep sighed. “Sorry about the waxing you’re about to receive, Randy. I should have maybe tested it out first.”
Zeppelin went back inside, and Henry looked at Curtis. “Could you go get me a trash bag and rip it down the side? We need something for him to stand on so all this shit can get thrown away. It looks like it’ll choke pigeons or kill fish or something. We need to contain it.”
“Yessir.” Curtis turned toward the door, and Henry had a sudden thought.
“Where’s Cotton?” Because that would have made matters fucking perfect in chaos—if Cotton had been there to cry in sympathy as they hard-waxed poor Randy.
“He’s on the schedule today,” Curtis said. He frowned. “You know, he hasn’t had a date in a month. That’s pretty awesome. That shit was killing him.”
Well, good. They had one guy who wasn’t falling apart, bully for apartment 126C.
“Fantastic,” Henry muttered, and Curtis took the hint and left. For a moment, it was just Henry and the perpetually horny kid who seemed to have one goal in life.
And now it was two.
“Randy?” Henry said into the quiet left to them. “What were you thinking?”
“Breaking out—”
Henry shook his head. “Sweetheart, the last couple of months you’ve been running around like a headless chicken. You’re like, ‘I want to bang all the things and then wank all the things and now, it’s why not try all the things?’ What’s wrong? What’s going to happen if you stand still?”
Randy gaped at him. “I… uh.” He swallowed and two big tears rolled down the glossy stuff across his cheeks. “Do I have to talk about it like this?”
Henry looked around them. Everyone else was busy. “You have about five minutes to center yourself and take a deep breath,” he said softly. “Five minutes to figure out what all this activity is about, so you can find a quiet place to go when we start ripping your hair out by the roots. Use your time wisely.”
Randy swallowed. “I can’t ever go home,” he said hoarsely. “I… I just don’t want to think about that.”
Okay, then. “I can’t ever go home, either,” Henry told him. “Not to my parents’ house. Not to the military, which was my home for nine years. Not to my abusive ex-boyfriend who happens to be married to my sister. I can’t go back.”
Randy sucked in a big breath of air. “Oh my God! Really?”
“Really, really. But you know what?”
Randy shook his head. “No.” More tears rolled over the mask, dropping off his chin as clear as if they’d been coming from his reddened eyes. God, this shit was gonna suck to peel off.
“This is my home now. And I’m going to work really hard not to shit the bed while I’m here. You understand what I’m saying?”
Randy nodded, more tears following the first batch. “I’ll remember that,” he said gruffly.
“And another thing.” Henry hated to bring this up, but, well, there were things Randy needed to know. “Use the pool at the gym from now on and not the one here. They use baking soda and not chlorine. I think that’s why your skin’s been so angry. Buddy, you’re surrounded by guys who have made skincare their priority. One of us has got to have the answer.”
“Doh!” Randy squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh my God, you know, you’re totally right, Henry. That’s probably the answer.”
“Glad to help.”
At that moment the door burst open and Billy came out with the ibuprofen and water, Curtis followed with the trash bag, and Henry figured Fisher would be back with the green aloe goop before they were even halfway done.
For Randy’s sake, it was time to get a move on.
Lance got there when they’d just got to his legs and ass, which was the worst part.
His face had a little ginger scruff, and his chest hair was barely there. But his ass had a full complement of red fur, which might have added to the breakouts, considering the heat. Right as Lance walked up, Henry had grabbed a big strip of the black mask and yanked hard, wincing at the holler and whimper that emerged from Randy’s already shredded throat.
“What the holy hell?” Lance asked, taking the stairs two at a time. Randy had buried his face against Billy’s neck, and Billy was stroking his hair back and soothing him like he would a child, while the others tried to clean the discarded black seaweed wrap and the painful amounts of ginger hair from the cement.
“We tried using hair clippers on it,” Henry said unhappily, “but that didn’t work either. Nail polish remover, baby oil—nada. There was no choice. We had to rip the whole thing off.”
“Oh, honey,” Lance murmured. Fisher was already squeezing an almost emptied bottle of green goop over Randy’s exposed skin. About the time they’d finished with his back, Henry had sent Curtis out for three more bottles.
They were down to two.
Randy whimpered some more, and Henry went after the next strip. He’d taken off his sport coat and jeans before he’d started ripping, and was wearing his board shorts and an old T-shirt—covered in ginger hair.
“Okay, Randy, we’ve only got a little longer here. I need you to be strong.”
“O-o-okkkayyy, Henry!” Randy wailed, and Henry shored himself up and went for it.
Schwack, more hair. And there went Zeppelin with the washcloth, then Fisher with the green goop, and Curtis and Cotton finished up with a broom and dustpan.
Cotton had arrived about a half an hour after they’d started, which had been odd because he should have been busy for another couple of hours. He hadn’t said anything, though—he’d just jumped in to help.
Bless the kid, he’d been the only one able to calm Randy down when they’d had to wax his balls.
And again. And again. Lance took over the green-goop duty and shooed Fisher into the shower, and together they soldiered on.
Finally—finally—it was over. Henry finished with the last of the washcloth, and Lance finished up with the lidocaine-aloe mixture, and Randy sobbed on Billy’s shoulders.
“I suggest a cool bath with some oatmeal,” Lance said. “Maybe wait until the rest of us shower. Then have somebody put the lidocaine on you again.” He grimaced. “Then take two more ibuprofen and go watch some mind-numbing shit on television, okay? You’re king of the remote control today—nobody’s gonna fight you for it. You can even lie on the couch naked. We’ll all find places to sit.”
Randy nodded sadly, and Cotton said, “I’ll go put an old sheet on the couch so he can sit down until it’s bath time. How’s that, Randy?”
Randy nodded again, and Billy and Cotton escorted him inside while Lance and Henry gave the porch a thorough once-over for all the hair they’d missed.
“God, that sucked,” Henry muttered, tying the garbage bag in a knot. “I can’
t even believe how much that sucked.”
“It would have been worse if you hadn’t been here,” Lance said. “Nice thinking on the aloe lidocaine, by the way.”
Henry shrugged. “My mom put it on everything from mosquito bites to sunburns. I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
They both let out a breath. “So,” Lance said, “about that errand we were going to run…?”
Henry shook his head. “Tomorrow. Man, they need us today.” He looked out from under the landing, where the sun had barely started to lower. It was afternoon already. “Do we have enough ices for everybody? Fizzy water? Is there enough comfort in the fucking apartment for all those fucked-up kids?”
Lance gave him a lopsided smile. “Yeah,” he said. “And you know what? We’re part of that.”
Henry grimaced. “You know, I was so excited about getting some better paying jobs and finding a way to move out of here, but….”
Lance nodded, and it was like they both shared the same thought. “How are we going to have our own sex in an apartment with five other guys?”
“Nooooo…. Doesn’t one of us have to have a uterus before we squirt out sextuplets?”
Lance raised his hand so he could laugh behind it and then dropped it because like everything else on the landing, it was covered with ginger fuzz. He bent over double, laughing harder, until Henry wrapped an arm around his shoulders to bear him up. And while they were losing their shit, semi-hysterical with laughter, the door across from them opened up.
Henry could swear his freshman English teacher stuck her head out. A tiny, wizened, disapproving woman in her seventies glared at the both of them until they fell abruptly silent.
“Is that young man done screaming?” she asked.
“Uh… yes?” Henry said. “Yes, ma’am. He’s going to be okay now.”
“Ask me if I care if he’s going to be all right,” she snapped. “I dare you. Ask me.”
Lance sucked air in through his teeth. “I give, Auntie. Do you care that our friend is going to be fine?”
“No! Now, ask me if I care about half your junior college having sex in your apartment at all hours of the day!”
It was Henry’s turn. “Uhm, do you mind that our roommates seem to be having sex at all hours of the day?”
“Yes!” she shouted. “Yes, I very much do mind. And I don’t care that you’re all young men. I don’t give a damn who you’re screwing in there! Ask me what I care about!”
Well, they were in it now. “Uhm, ma’am?” Henry ventured. “What do you care about?”
“You assholes are loud as fuck! Now I tried to tell the super about it, but he got his head chopped off—”
“Throat slit,” Henry corrected before he could stop himself.
“Henry!” Lance growled.
“I was there—I saw it! He got his throat slit!”
“I don’t care if he got his spleen pulled out through his penis,” the tiny harridan snarled. “He didn’t do anything to stop the noise! Now we have a new super, and I tried to complain about the noise to him, but all he said was he needed to get his books in order before he does anything about it. So I’m stuck with you people, screaming ‘Do me, do me!’ all night long, and now, apparently, you’re just screaming!”
Henry actually heard himself swallow. “We’re, uh, sorry about that, ma’am—”
“And what is this fuzzy stuff!”
“That’s our friend’s body hair,” Henry answered tersely, angry on Randy’s behalf. “And a very expensive seaweed exfoliant depilatory.”
“Go fuck in someone else’s building!” And with that, she slammed the door in their faces and left them on the echoing landing.
“Good answer, Henry,” Lance said.
“Shut up.”
“You can tell she was really impressed.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Are you going to want to talk about it to the super?” Lance asked, and they both winced.
“Sure,” Henry said, trying not to scratch all over his body. “I’ll just tell him that I’ve got no idea what she’s talking about. I mean, who’s actually on the lease?”
Lance blinked. “Uh… I have no idea. We go down and pay rent. I mean, it gets renewed every year, so it’s got to be someone….”
They squinted at each other, and Henry got a niggle of curiosity and a really great idea.
“Let’s go shower,” he said. “And calm the guys down. And then I may need to call my brother or maybe Galen.”
That seemed like a really awesome plan, but their day wasn’t over yet, and he didn’t get to that phone call for another week.
AFTER THEY’D showered—and of course by then, the water was freezing cold, but it was still hot outside so neither of them cared—Lance checked on Randy, who was lying on the inflatable bed because he said he felt bad about taking the whole couch. The aloe and lidocaine seemed to be working, as did the codeine Curtis had pulled out of his sock drawer that he’d saved when he’d gotten his wisdom teeth pulled the year before, and Randy was mostly comfortable and a little out of it, watching Pixar movies.
Curtis, Billy, and Cotton were all draped on one another on the couch, and Zeppelin and Fisher were having a quiet, intense conversation in their room.
Lance got out of the shower first, and as Henry scanned the room, he remembered that Cotton had come home early.
“Cotton?” he asked softly. “Is there anything wrong?”
Cotton’s eyes grew bright and shiny and vulnerable, and Henry wanted to cry himself. Wow. This day had started with a funeral and had just gotten worse.
“Want to go talk about it?” Henry asked, and Lance looked at him in surprise.
Cotton nodded and followed Henry meekly to Lance’s bed. Henry thought he should maybe put a sign up overhead that said, “Advice $.05”—but he didn’t think anyone would get it but him.
“What happened?” Henry asked, sitting on the bed and bouncing experimentally. Yup—newish mattress, good box springs. He and Lance could have some fun on this bed, if only they could ever be alone.
“I… I was getting ready for my scene,” Cotton whispered. “I was fluffing in a corner while John checked the light, and my scene partner was fluffing, and… and the guy was new. Young—maybe twenty—and he looked… I mean, he wasn’t the same guy, but he looked just like… like there was this guy, before I started working for John. He used to… I mean, I did what he said, and that’s how I knew I could charge for it, but he never paid me and I had to and… anyway, I started to cry. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.”
Oh.
Henry held out his arm, and there was nothing sexual about Cotton’s cuddle this time. “What’d John do?”
“He took me aside and said it was okay,” Cotton told him, his voice broken. “Said nobody should have to do something that made them cry. I told him I didn’t know what else to do with my life, and he said we’d think of something. When I’d calmed down, he gave me this… this card. Said there was a shrink there I could talk to—that it was on the health plan and everything. He told me not to worry about rent, but I said I had to pull my weight. He told me he’d find something else around the set for me to do. Anything, he said, except something that hurt me the way this seemed to right now.”
“He’s a good guy,” Henry said, remembering all the shit he’d given John and Galen at first.
“But what am I going to do now?” Cotton wailed.
And Henry held him, just like Billy had held Randy, and told him it was going to be okay. “John’s right,” he murmured, when Cotton had calmed down. “Don’t worry about rent. This group of assclowns has your back, okay? And it’s not like anybody eats that much, right?”
Cotton sputtered tears against his clean shirt, but Henry didn’t care.
“No, seriously. Call that shrink tomorrow. First thing. Lance and I will help. If you don’t want to work for John, I’ve got a line on a guy who cleans houses. I know it sounds like… like a
step down, but you know what? It’s honest. It’s honest, and there’s skill involved, and this guy would be a fun boss like John. And nobody would expect you to take your clothes off, and nobody would hit on you—well, this guy hits on everybody, but he wouldn’t if I told him not to—and you could work with your earbuds on, and it would be all okay. What do you think?”
Cotton wiped his face on Henry’s shirt. “I think I’ve got options,” he said with a little smile. “And I think… I think you and Lance and the guys would take care of me as long as I need. And I may need it for a little while. But not always. And some day, I’ll get my shit together, and I’ll take care of people too.”
Henry hugged him again, tightly. “You’ll be amazing at it,” he said softly. “But first let’s take care of you.”
COTTON SLEPT in Lance’s bed that night, and Randy—thank God—slept in his own. Zeppelin and Fisher took the queen-sized, which left Curtis on his bed, Billy on the couch, and Lance and Henry on the inflatable bed.
Billy was watching a movie quietly on his laptop, earbuds in, which finally—finally—gave them a chance to talk.
“How’d it go?” Lance asked quietly. They were lying on the mattress, under a sheet, while the fan whirred overhead. Henry suddenly wondered who he’d have to blow to get the air-conditioning to work properly and then laughed softly to himself.
No, no—that wouldn’t work either.
“The service? It was fine,” Henry said. “Rivers got hold of Martin’s first boyfriend, and he said something nice about how we weren’t mourning what Martin was, we were mourning what he could have been. How we’d have to work hard to try to keep the other Martin Sampsons of the world from falling through the cracks and becoming scumbags. It was really nice.”
“Pretty idealistic,” Lance murmured. “Hard to live up to.”
“It’s good to have goals.” Henry closed his eyes and smiled. That morning, when he and Davy had been standing under that tree, he’d felt that terrible sense of letdown. Now, talking about goals, about taking care of the porn kids—whoever lived under this roof—and thinking about the last bit of PI work he wanted to do on his own case, some of that letdown faded away, and that sense of purpose, the one that had sustained him when he’d been under suspicion, filled his belly. “I mean, that’s what we’re doing here, right? These guys?”