by Lisa Henry
“And you like him,” she says, jabbing Noah’s spoon in his direction. “Like him, like him.”
“Really, we’re back to that?”
“We never left it, Jai,” Kat says with a grin.
Jai rides his bike out of town, feeling the drag of the wind as the buildings and houses slip away. About thirty miles out, there’s a spot his dad used to take him to. It’s just a curve of the river, with nothing special about it except that it holds the memory of so many long afternoons sitting with his dad, just talking.
They called it fishing, but half the time they left the rods in the truck.
Jai parks his bike off the road.
When he was a kid, there was no path here for cyclists and walkers. Now it’s another place among millions where the smooth concrete means it’s impossible to leave footprints. It’s still nice though. Birds dive for insects skittering across the surface of the river. The wind encourages the trees to dip their branches toward the water. The day is a little hazy and warm.
Jai crosses the bike path and walks down the slope of the riverbank. He sits in the dry grass and watches the water.
He imagines his dad sitting beside him, and imagines the things he might tell him.
It’s been years, but it’s not the sort of pain that vanishes. The sharper edges of it have softened over time, and it’s become a dull ache. It’s not a raw wound anymore, but it will always be scar tissue.
He thinks back to Kat’s teasing at breakfast, and wonders what his dad would have made of this thing with Nick. His dad was always the quiet one of the family. Jai takes after him in that respect, he supposes. Maybe his mom is right and he’s an introvert too. He’s never thought of himself like that before, but he does like to take time for himself, to sit and think.
It’s weird, then, that he likes Nick.
Nick is everything Jai is not. Nick is loud. Nick has no discernable filter. He’s smart, but he’s also scatterbrained. He has energy levels that can only be attributed to a diet full of caffeine and sugar. By rights, Jai should find him exasperating. Instead, he finds him oddly charming.
Jai smiles and toys with a strand of grass.
He’s fun.
Nick is fun.
And Kat is right.
Jai likes him, likes him.
“Jai!” Devon exclaims when Jai walks into work that afternoon. “Pool party, my place, Saturday night. You’re off, so are you coming?”
Jai hesitates for a moment.
“Nick’s coming!” Devon says with his easy smile. “Well, I haven’t asked him yet, but he’ll totally be coming. It’s like the last party I’ll get to throw before college. Everyone’s going to be there.”
“Okay,” Jai says, figuring he can always sneak out again if he hates it.
“Great!” Devon slaps him on the back. “My mom and stepdad will be away, and since the last thing Lewis used the pool for was so his pastor could come over and, like, adult baptize people, I’m counting on you and Nick to get in the water and really gay it up.”
“Gay it up?”
“Yeah.” Devon’s smile widens. “I need you guys to use your rainbow mojo to neutralize all the fundie that got put in the water when the pastor blessed it.”
“You and Nick are as crazy as each other,” Jai tells him with a shake of his head, even while a grin tugs at the corners of his mouth.
“We really are.” Devon beams. “Hey!” he yells into the kitchen. “Where’s the extra mozzarella sticks for table five?”
Jai heads to the back to shove his helmet in his locker.
Devon is ridiculous. Rainbow mojo? It’s no surprise at all that he’s Nick’s best friend. They are obviously twins who were separated at birth.
Jai is waiting tables tonight, and hoping he’ll see Nick at some point. Why wouldn’t he? Nick’s attached to Devon at the hip, and since Devon’s working, Nick is sure to show up. Jai is a few hours into his shift when the bells on the door jangle and Nick steps inside. He heads over to the counter to fist-bump Devon, then turns his gaze on the restaurant area.
His face lights up when he sees Jai, and Jai smiles in return.
He thought it might be awkward—well, more awkward than Nick usually is—but Nick just slides into an empty booth and grins when Jai approaches him.
“Did you know there’s a Pizza Hut in Japan run entirely by cats?”
Jai considers that for a moment. “That can’t be true.”
“It’s called Pizza Cat,” Nick tells him. “You can look it up.”
“I’m probably not going to do that.”
“You have no soul.” Nick sets his phone on the table. “What’s the staff special tonight?”
“Meatlovers with a burned crust and cheese that was one day past its expiration date.”
“Sounds great!”
It really doesn’t, but who is Jai to judge?
It’s quiet enough that Jai’s able to grab a few minutes and slide into the booth across from Nick after he fetches his pizza from the kitchen. Nick grins and flushes when Jai taps a foot against his. His smile eases some of the tension Jai didn’t even know he was carrying. Last night was Nick’s first time, and an emoji of an eggplant wasn’t exactly explanatory.
“How are you doing today?” he asks.
“Good,” Nick says through a mouthful of pizza, then narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Wait, do you mean like emotionally, or like how is my ass doing?”
Jai snorts. “Um, either, I guess.”
“We are both good,” Nick says. “My ass and me. I mean, there was a minute when I was looking at my bike seat wondering if I really wanted to come here tonight, but . . .” He shrugs. “Free pizza.”
“Right,” Jai says, feeling like Nick has dodged the second part of the question entirely. “Free pizza.”
Nick’s flush deepens, and he ducks his head briefly.
“Are you going to be hanging around until I finish?” Jai asks.
Nick wrinkles his nose. “Ugh. My mom wants me home by nine. We have ‘college stuff’ to do.” Air quotes. “She wants me and my dad to write a weekly budget and lock in which meal plan I’m going to get.”
Nick is wearing that same haunted, hunted look he gets whenever he talks about college, and Jai feels a stab of sympathy. He remembers that sensation of being trapped, but never by his mom. She knew he was desperate to get out of town. She worried about all the trouble he could get into while traveling, but she never tried to stop him. Probably because she knew it wouldn’t have made a difference.
When Jai was Nick’s age, he had already left Franklin behind. He’d already been halfway around the world, surrounded by people whose language he couldn’t understand. He’d thrown himself into the strangeness of being on the outside, being the other. He’d relished it. At eighteen, Jai would have turned his lip up at the thought of staying in Franklin to work at a pizza place, or even going away to college. A small town full of small minds, or years in the drone factory of further education. He felt nothing but contempt for both options, and for anyone who didn’t see it the way he did.
He was an asshole at eighteen.
Travel broadened his mind in unexpected ways. He knows he was a dick. He knows that just because other people don’t enrich their lives the exact way he does, doesn’t mean their lives are shallow and pointless. He learned not to judge, not even the people who look like him and speak with a Midwestern twang. That was the hardest thing.
He grew up.
Nick, picking the burned crust off his pizza, still has a lot of growing up to do.
Jai wonders what Nick will be like when he’s done and, for the first time, feels a little sorry that he’ll probably never know.
“Rain check, I guess,” Jai says, standing up to get back to work.
“Yes, rain check!” Nick agrees, and then frowns. “That’s a dumb expression. What does it even mean? How can I speak Elvish and not know English?”
“How can you speak Elvish?” Jai asks.
&nb
sp; “Um, nerd alert, hello.” Nick gestures to his Planet Express T-shirt.
Jai leaves him, laughing, and grabs a couple of menus for the family who has just walked in.
When Jai gets a chance to look at Nick again, he’s engrossed with his phone.
Jai: Pizza Cat was a viral marketing campaign for Pizza Hut.
Nick: What? Why r u trying to crush all my dreams? Also, u totally looked it up!
Jai: Because I needed to make sure I’m not living in a crazy world where cats make pizza.
Nick: Scared they’ll put u out of a job?
Jai: Don't be ridiculous. Everyone knows that’s what robots are for.
Nick: Lol! Good night.
Jai: Good night.
On an otherwise innocuous Wednesday morning, Chris Stahlnecker announces his plans to ruin Nick’s summer.
“Nick,” he says, frowning at him over his breakfast. “Go and get dressed. You’re coming to work with me.”
“What?” Nick gapes. He shouldn’t even be out of bed yet. He was up until three in the morning on Tumblr. “Seriously?”
“You have twenty minutes to get ready,” Chris says.
Wow. Okay. Working with his dad. It’s a fantasy Nick grew out of when he was about four, actually. It’s been at least that long since he used to wave at his dad from the driveway every morning and complain to his mom that he wanted to go to the office and play with Daddy all day. “Playing with daddy” definitely has some weirder porn-related connotations these days. Which was skeevy at first, but luckily Nick developed some hard-core denial to combat his cognitive dissonance, which made it possible to get off on daddy porn without thinking of his biological father. It’s been smooth, sticky sailing since then.
“Nick,” his dad sighs. “Twenty minutes.”
“Right!” Nick hurries upstairs to leap into the shower.
It’s closer to twenty-five minutes before he’s stumbling downstairs again, hair wet, button-up shirt sticking to his back a little. His dad doesn’t comment on his tardiness though. He only opens the door and ushers Nick toward his car.
Nick settles into the passenger seat, hauling his phone out to text Devon about this latest disturbing development in his life. This feels a little like an ambush, which is fine, except does his dad think that Nick needed to be ambushed? Like if he’d spoken to him beforehand that Nick would have made up some excuse to get out of it? He probably would have, he guesses. Maybe? He doesn’t really know.
“Jesus,” Chris mutters as he backs the car out into the street, “it’s like you’re surgically attached to that thing.”
Nick glances from his phone’s screen to his dad. “Um, I was just telling Devon that we couldn’t hang later today.”
His dad grunts.
Nick watches their neighbors’ yards slide past the window. “So, is this like a whole summer thing?”
His dad’s hands tighten on the steering wheel for a moment. “That’s the plan.”
“Okay.” Nick’s stomach sinks. “Um, what will I be doing, exactly?”
“You can answer phones with Charlene, and do some filing. Then we’ll see.”
“Oh, so the same stuff I did at Mr. Grover’s,” Nick says, and his dad winces a little. Nick thinks of the porta-potty incident and winces as well. “Well, not everything I did there, just, um, office-related stuff?”
He’s kind of looking forward to getting another stapler, to be honest. Staplers are fun.
“Just office-related stuff,” Chris repeats, the corners of his mouth turning down.
Nick stares fixedly at the screen of his phone again.
There is probably never a time when his parents are going to find the blowjob thing funny. Which is a shame, because Nick feels it has the potential to be comedy gold. A real ice-breaker at parties. He bites his lower lip to hide a grin as he imagines someone seeing him and Jai together—this is for comedic purposes only, okay? It’s not like it’s going to happen or anything, or that Nick wants it to happen—and saying, So, how did you two meet?
It’s funny, right?
Nick wonders if his dad would crack a smile about it if it was someone else’s kid instead of his own.
The drive downtown seems interminable. His dad isn’t even listening to the radio.
“Mom tells me she met your boyfriend,” Chris says when they stop for a red light.
“Oh, yeah.” Nick feels a stab of guilt, and he’s not sure if it’s because he told his parents he had a boyfriend when he doesn’t, or if it’s because maybe a tiny, secret part of him sort of wishes that . . . No, he’s cool. He’s being grown-up, right? No strings and all that. Except the other night with Jai was so great that Nick can’t help imagining what it would be like to be Jai’s boyfriend. Maybe it wouldn’t be that different from what they’re doing now, or maybe they’d actually spend the night together, and cuddle and stuff.
And then he feels guilty for even thinking about cheating on his cuddle-bro Devon.
“Jai, was it?”
“Yeah.” It’s like this red light is never going to change.
“What does he do?”
“He works at Pizza Perfecto,” Nick says, and his dad gets that same dubious look his mom did in Walmart. It rankles. “Actually, he travels. For like nine months of the year, and then he comes back here in the summer and works. He’s been to a bunch of places. It’s pretty cool.”
Chris raises his eyebrows a fraction and taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “And what are his plans for the future?”
“He’s going to Argentina.”
“I meant, what does he want for a career?”
Nick shrugs. “Hashtag YOLO?”
Chris looks at him with a frown.
Nick sighs. “I don’t know, Dad. Why am I getting the third degree? We’re messing around, okay? We’re not getting married.”
“So it’s not serious?”
“No, it’s not serious,” Nick mutters. “I’m going to college soon, remember?”
“Of course,” his dad says, and something like relief crosses his face.
Then the light turns green and they head downtown.
Nick: I have a job?
Jai: Congratulations?
Nick: It’s with my dad. Hella awkward.
Jai: What does your dad do?
Nick: He’s an accountant.
Jai: And you love math so much.
Nick: Ugh. Kill me now. Please.
Charlene isn’t as much fun to work with as Patricia was, Scrabble obsession and weird tea fetish aside. The problem, Nick decides, is that Charlene has known Nick since he was a baby. He suspects she even babysat him a few times. Of course she treats him like a sweet little apple-cheeked kid. She changed his diaper more than once. She’s nice, but she’s not as surprisingly filthy as Patricia often was.
But Nick does get a key to the office supplies closet, so this job definitely has an upside. He not only gets his own brand-new stapler, he also starts a collection of different-colored Post-it notes in the top drawer of his desk. By lunchtime he’s used them to make an Attack on Titan flipbook, and storyboarded the next episode of his web comic.
Accountancy is exactly as exciting as construction was, and Nick doesn’t even have Jai Hazenbrook’s perfect ass to look forward to.
Except, like, he totally does.
Okay, so it’s not like Jai is going to brighten his day by walking into the office and giving Nick something to ogle, but, on the plus side, Nick is now actually allowed to touch his ass. And also his abs. And also to kiss him and blow him, and do all the things. All of them. And the reality completely eclipses the fantasy in every way.
Nick chews on the end of his new pen—he has twelve—and daydreams about everything he’s going to do with Jai at Devon’s pool party on Saturday night. Disturbingly, most of his fantasies seem to involve the people he went to high school with mistaking Jai for his actual boyfriend. Oh yes, look what the short kid dragged in, fuckers.
This is already the best
summer ever, and it’s only going to get better.
Because—Nick squirms in his chair—because Jai said that Nick can top him, and that is kind of awesome and incredible, right? And if it feels even half as good as bottoming, then Nick is going to love it.
He writes himself a list.
1. Research topping.
2. Buy lube like a grown-up. Lots of lube.
3. Research prep!!!!
4. Attempt to last longer than 30 seconds when you put your dick in the hottest guy in the universe.
Look at him, prioritizing like an adult. His dad would be so proud.
But, also, probably he wouldn’t be, so Nick waits until his half-chub subsides, and takes his list to the shredder and disposes of it carefully. Then he sits at his desk again and stares at the motivational poster of a raindrop on the opposite wall and worries that maybe he lied to Jai the other night at Pizza Perfecto. Not about his ass. His ass is fine. But about his emotions?
Nick has emotions, and he’s not entirely sure what to do about them.
The raindrop poster doesn’t offer any clues.
Neither does the scuffed carpet that Nick turns his attention to next.
He fiddles with his phone for a while, curling the springy cord around his finger and then pulling it straight and then letting it go again so it grabs him like a little coiled tentacle. Then he glances over to where Charlene is pretending not to glare at him, and stops fucking around with the phone.
After lunch he steals another pen from the office supplies.
He calls it Gloria, and decides that it’s his favorite.
“This is nice,” Marnie says, her smile a little too bright. “Eating dinner together, like a family.”
Nick drags his fork through his mashed potatoes and hopes the sound he makes is an agreeable hum.
“How was work, boys?” she says, and Nick silently prays she’s not being cute. He and his dad going to work together? That’s not cute. It’s awkward and horrible, and the more time they spend together, the less they have to say to one another.