by Cari Z
“I admit nothing.” Aaron was sure he kept his face perfectly straight, but Tyler saw right through him.
“You’d give it up. You don’t even like M&Ms―you’d give them to me.”
“Maybe.”
“How about givin’ me your cinnamon roll?”
Aaron pulled his plate in closer. “Fuck off.” Tyler laughed and went to find his own breakfast.
“So, how do you want me to help fancy these up?” he asked once he was back at the table, with his own cinnamon roll, two eggs over easy and toast to dip in them, and a huge mug of coffee.
“She wants the ends of the ribbons curled.” Aaron passed a bunch of tied-off bags and a pair of scissors over to Tyler. “Go for it.”
They worked through breakfast and finished up a little after eleven, finger-sore but finally done. There was even a handful or so of candy left at the end, which Aaron offered to Tyler, who pounced on them like he was starving.
“You’d think I never feed you.”
“You don’t feed me near often enough,” Tyler agreed around a mouthful of chocolate. “Leavin’ me to feed myself is only askin’ for trouble too.”
“I know. I’m kind of amazed you don’t have diabetes or high blood pressure yet.”
“Like I said before: lucky genes.” He picked out the few M&Ms hiding in the corners of the bag, popped them into his mouth, then leaned his chair back onto its hind legs. “So. We’ve got some time to kill now, yeah?”
“Hours,” Aaron confirmed. “Zach’s supposed to get back around four with his groomsmen, and then we’re doing the bachelor party tonight.”
“Really?” Tyler sat forward, clearly excited. “What’s that gonna consist of? Cattle rustling?”
Aaron rolled his eyes. “Kansas isn’t the wild west, Ty, and it’s not the eighteen hundreds either. No, I sincerely doubt we’ll go cattle rustling. Probably just a strip club or something. That’s traditional, right?”
“Ooh, a strip club would be fun. I could buy you a lap dance.”
“You’d be wasting your money.”
“Are you kidding?” He was practically bouncing in the chair. “It’d be worth it just for the look on your face! We could—shit—” Whatever else they could have done was lost to gravity as Tyler overbalanced the chair and fell backward onto the hardwood floor.
“Ty!” Aaron leapt up and came around to him, just in time to see him wince and rub the back of his head. “You fucking idiot,” he said as he got down on one knee beside him. “Are you okay?”
“Uh….” Tyler shook his head from side to side a little. “Yeah. I think so. I didn’t hit real hard, but my head kinda bounced a bit. I’m fine.”
“Your head bounced off the floor and you’re telling me you’re fine.” Aaron was torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to drag Tyler to the nearest emergency room. “You’re a piece of work.”
“I’m sturdy. I promise. Help me up?” Aaron grabbed Tyler’s hand and hoisted him to his feet, then reached around to the back of his head and carefully felt around for a lump. Tyler stood still for the tactile inspection, his eyes never leaving Aaron’s face. “So,” he said once Aaron was finished, a half smile on his face. “Do I pass?”
“I guess we’re lucky your head is so hard, but don’t think I won’t tell Whit about this.”
“He’ll just use it as ammunition!”
“Exactly. Maybe it’ll remind you to be more careful next time.”
“Whatever, Mom.” Tyler looked kind of pleased, though. “You wanna go for a walk?”
“I don’t know. Do you think you can manage walking down the street without falling on your face?”
“Maybe. You might have to hold me up, though, just in case.”
There were worse things that Aaron could think of than walking along the riverbank with an arm around Tyler’s waist, which was why he didn’t let himself think of it often. “Get dressed. We’ll go down to Esplanade.”
Esplanade was one of the oldest streets in the town, tracing the edge of the river from a high, grassy bank and lined with mansions that had been built over a century ago. Aaron had never been inside any of them—a lot of them were bought by retired army officers, not the sort of people who had little kids around—but he’d always liked looking at them when he was young.
“Fancy,” Tyler noted as they walked along.
“Yeah. I used to wish we could live in one of them. Even back then, though, there’s no way we could have afforded the rent.”
“What did your mom do for work?”
Aaron chuckled. “She didn’t work. Not consistently. If she had a boyfriend around, we made do with what he brought in. Otherwise, we got assistance from the state. Medicaid, food stamps, reduced rent. Even then, we could only afford shitty places.” He pointed out in front of them. “Head along this street as far as downtown and you’ll eventually find the house we stayed in the longest.”
“The one with all the mosquitoes.”
“That’s the one.” And the toilets that always clogged, and the porch that had collapsed in one corner and almost taken Zach with it, and the leaky roof. “It was a shitty place,” Aaron admitted, “but I didn’t realize that for a long time. You grow up with something, it seems normal to you. It’s other people who’re the weird ones. Like, my mom was high all the time, but she never smoked cigarettes. I couldn’t get used to the smell in Chrissy’s house, not the whole time I was there. Never mind that I had a roof over my head and three meals a day and a family that was trying to be good to me, I couldn’t get over the fucking smell.”
“Does it still bother you?” Tyler asked, drifting a little closer to Aaron’s side.
“The smell?” He shrugged. “No more than anything else. It’s a part of the place now, not something that feels inherently wrong just because I’m not used to it.”
“Was there any of that when you came to live at our house? Things that seemed wrong?” Tyler actually sounded a little upset at the prospect.
“No.” Not even close. Aaron had been through the foster care system by then; he’d adapted to unusual until nothing bothered him, because he refused to let it. “Not even the potpourri,” he teased, and that got a reluctant smile. “Are you ready to head back?”
“Yeah. I should get some work done before the bachelor party.” Tyler rubbed his hands together with anticipation. “Twenty bucks says we do something crazy.”
“Twenty bucks says we go to a strip club,” Aaron countered.
“You’re on.”
Chapter Nine
ZACH got back to Chrissy’s house at half past four with three vaguely familiar guys in tow, all of them joking and slapping each other on the back as they walked inside. A sense of dread came over Aaron as they approached, but shook it off and stood up from the couch where he and Tyler were watching a movie on Tyler’s laptop.
“Hey, you’re here!” Zach greeted them enthusiastically. “That’s perfect. Aaron, Ty, these are my half of the wedding party. This is—”
“Dude, no, I’ve got this.” One of them shouldered his way to the front—it wasn’t easy. He had a pretty big expanse of shoulder to make room for. Couple that with a height that rivaled Tyler’s and the beginnings of a substantial beer gut, and he was easily the biggest guy in the room. “You’re the gay brother, right?” he asked, smirking at Aaron.
“Owen, come on—”
“Yeah,” Aaron said flatly. “That’s me.”
“Great.” He turned to Tyler. “And you’re the gay brother’s gay boyfriend, right?”
“Queer as the day is long,” Tyler drawled before Aaron could correct anyone. “And you’re the big gay best friend, I take it?”
Owen shook his head. “Bro, this isn’t a chick flick. There are no gay best friends.”
“Then you must be the bumbling sidekick?”
Owen was frowning now. “I’m the guy with the badass plans for tonight, so if we could get the getting-to-know-yous out of the way, maybe we could get this guy�
��” He slapped Zach’s back hard enough to rock him forward. “—on his way to being totally wasted! Call me O-Dog.”
Tyler’s brow crinkled with mock-uncertainty. “What’s that? O-ring?”
“O-dawg, dude,” Owen said with a frown. “What, fairies can’t hear now?”
Zach hit him on the arm, his expression flinty. “Owen, seriously, knock it the fuck off.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Fine. Ruin my goddamn fun first thing. You can be GB and GBFF, because you’re BFFs, right? Gays have those, yeah?” He turned to the next guy without pausing. “This is Simon. He was a state champion wrestler in high school and he’s built like a goddamn gorilla, so he’s gonna be Monkey tonight.” The guy—shorter than Aaron but probably twice as broad—looked at Owen like he was a few screws loose but didn’t do anything but shrug.
“And this guy,” Owen went on, pointing at the slender man whose hair was starting to thin, “is Matthew, otherwise known as Becky’s charity case. He fucks cars, so we’ll call him Scooter.”
“I don’t fuck cars. I fuck girls in cars!” he protested.
“Bro, last time you told me about it sounded more like you were rubbing up against leather than inside pussy, y’know what I’m saying?” Owen waved Matthew’s complaint aside and focused on Zach again. “And since this guy is the one giving up all his freedom forever and ever, even if it is to a good woman, we’re gonna call him Jailbait. He’s got that look, yeah?” Owen grinned over at Aaron. “Admit it, if he wasn’t your brother and you saw him in a bar, you’d totally wanna do him.”
Aaron shrugged. “Nah, too twinkish.” Fuck it; if he had to listen to this guy, then he was going to give as good as he got. He could defend himself, as ready to take Owen on as Tyler seemed.
“Ha!” Owen almost bent double laughing. “Your brother called you a twink, dude! You gonna put up with that?”
“He can call me anything he wants.” Zach looked a little hunted, like he wondered if Aaron was about to stalk off in a huff.
“It’s not you, Zach. I’m just a bit of a size queen,” Aaron said apologetically, and now it was Tyler’s turn to laugh.
“Huh. No wonder you went for this big ol’ country boy, then,” Owen remarked. “Okay, are you guys ready for stage one of this wicked, mad, badass, brilliant night I’ve got planned for Jailbait?” He emphasized each word with a fist-pump, and Aaron wondered how long ago the guy had started drinking.
“Lay it on us,” Tyler encouraged him, then smiled coyly. “Or hell, you could just lay it on me and I’d be happy with that.”
“Dude!” Owen got flustered as everybody else chuckled. “No gay jokes, bro. I don’t swing that way.”
“So it’s only okay if you make the gay jokes?”
“Yeah.” Obviously, his tone said, and Aaron couldn’t help being a little amazed at how mind-bendingly resistant to logic the guy was. Tonight might be fun after all. “Right, so, we’re starting with shots. Shots!” he cried, rummaging through his backpack for a package of tiny red Dixie cups and a mason jar of a suspiciously clear liquid. “And not just any old shots. Shots of my grampa’s homemade moonshine. Puts hair on your chest, lifts your dick up instead of beating it down, pure liquid courage.”
“Who’s the designated driver?” Aaron asked. Owen, Simon, and Matthew all looked at him blankly, while Zach stared with something akin to panic.
“I didn’t even think of that,” Zach said. “Shit.”
“We don’t need one,” Owen tried, but Matthew shut that down immediately.
“Fuck off. I’m not losing my license over a DUI. Somebody’s got to be sober.”
“We can use Uber,” Tyler said, and this time it was Owen who shook his head.
“Nah, they don’t like to go as far out as I’m thinking. Plus, we’re paying for Zach here, but I’m not made of fucking money, you know?” He glanced at Aaron. “I bet you are, though. GB can pay!”
“How about I’m the designated driver instead?” Aaron suggested.
“Are you sure?” Zach looked like he thought the world was coming to an end. Aaron was happy to disabuse him of that notion.
“Absolutely. I don’t drink much anyway.”
“You sure you’re not just too good for my moonshine?” Owen asked.
Aaron politely refrained from rolling his eyes. “Nope, just taking one for the team.”
Owen looked like he couldn’t fathom any reason good enough not to drink but eventually shrugged. “Well… okay, cool.” He set the cups on the table and poured out shots—very, very generous shots—of what smelled like turpentine, then passed them around to everyone but Aaron. “Let’s get drunk!”
Everyone finished theirs in a single pull, even though Tyler made a face that let Aaron know the stuff tasted about as good as it smelled. All of them were gasping by the end of it, and Zach’s eyes were actually watering.
“Holy shit,” he wheezed. “That crap’s gonna make me go blind.”
“I’m not blind yet,” Owen said cheerfully.
“You’ve been inoculated with this stuff since birth. You don’t count.”
Owen caught Aaron’s eye and waggled the bottle. “Sure you don’t want in? Last chance not to be a buzzkill.”
“I’m resigned to it already,” Aaron assured him.
“Okay. In that case, next up: we’re heading to my daddy’s junkyard.”
“A junkyard?” Tyler started laughing. “What, you gonna give us a bunch of nerf guns and get people to attack us like zombies? ’Cause that would be awesome.”
“That would be awesome,” Matthew said.
Owen frowned. “I’ve got something better than that lined up. Quit wasting time and get us into the car.”
Of course, Zach’s car wasn’t big enough for all six of them to fit in, so they ended up taking Tyler’s 4Runner. Owen sat up front with him, alternately giving directions and telling dirty jokes with the rest of them as the punchlines. They were all pretty much the same joke, picking at each person’s biggest perceived flaw and magnifying it. Aaron let it all roll off his back—he’d had so, so much worse—but he could see Tyler starting to get tense in the middle seat, so he diverted Owen into giving him some more specifics about how far they were traveling.
It ended up taking half an hour to get to the junkyard, and people were starting to get uncomfortably sober by the time they arrived. Owen fixed that with another round of shots, then trooped them across bare dirt punctuated here and there with islands of gutted automobiles and appliances to what looked like a wooden dowel with a white sash tied around the end of it stuck in the ground next to two mostly intact cars. Actually, the sash had lettering on it…
“Miss Cornsilk USA?”
“Ah, yeah, I got that off a really hot girl I picked up in a bar last week,” Owen said with a smirk. “Needed something to tie her up with, and she just happened to have that, so….” He winked and grabbed his crotch.
“She just happened to have a fake pageant sash in her purse?” Tyler asked incredulously. “Man, really? You got played hard-core.”
“Hey, she was hot enough for it to be real! It could be real! And what do gays know about hard-core, anyway?”
“Probably a whole hell of a lot more than guys who go home with knockoff Miss Americas,” Tyler retorted.
“Yeah? Well, I guess a faggot wouldn’t know anything about bringing home women, unless you were just gonna paint each other’s damn nails.”
Tyler was getting almost as red in the face as Owen, but Zach was the one who stepped in. “You keep this shit up and I’m going to knock your ass out,” he said seriously. It shouldn’t have been possible for someone half a foot shorter than Owen to loom so effectively, but Zach managed it somehow. Must have been his prison guard training.
Owen looked at Aaron with an expression like a wounded dog. “I was just kidding, man. Tell your brother to calm down.”
Aaron shrugged. “Say that word one more time and I’m not driving your ass anywhere.”
&nbs
p; “But you’re our designated driver,” Owen objected. “We need you to get places.”
“Yeah, and you won’t be getting any places, including back to town, because I won’t be giving you a ride when I head back to Chrissy’s. I’m serious,” Aaron added when Owen opened his mouth. “Keep it up and I will leave you here to play with your junk and take everybody else back without you.”
“What did I tell you?” Zach snapped. “Fucking stop it, or I’m leaving with him and the night ends now.”
“It’s not my fault he can’t take a—”
“Okay, bye.” Aaron started to turn around.
“Stop! Jesus Christ, why are you being such a….” He paused and looked at his friends’ unimpressed faces. “A whiny… bitch… about it? Is that okay? Can I at least call you that?”
Aaron shrugged. “If I can call you an overgrown asshole on steroids, sure.”
“Fair enough.” Owen took a moment to recover his aplomb. “All right, douchebags—douchebags is fine, right, ’cause I’m calling all of you that—it’s time for junkyard drag racing!” And there went the fistpumps.
“You’d love to be tough enough to get called a douchebag,” Tyler muttered, but he wasn’t the type to let someone else’s bad behavior keep him down for long. He already looked interested in the cars, which Owen stood between like some sort of hick, genderbent Vanna White.
“On this side, we have a 2007 Kia Spectra that tried to ram somebody’s ass and got rammed instead.” He patted the crumpled hood to the left. “She overheats in under five minutes, is leaking oil, and probably has a cracked radiator, but we don’t fuckin’ care ’cause my dad let me have it for free!”
Zach and Simon whooped, but Matthew looked a little worried.
“We’re not going to deliberately damage these cars, are we? That seems really unwise. It’ll only lower their value, and it’s kind of… mean, too.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Jesus, listen to yourself, man. They’re cars! They can’t feel it! And they’re already fucked up. That’s why I got them for free.”