by Amy Lane
Carpenter was left blessedly alone for the moment with Dane, next to a roaring fire, underneath a sugar-frost scattering of ice-bright stars.
“Huh.” Carpenter was sleeping on Skip and Richie’s couch that night, because he didn’t want to spend Christmas Eve alone and because they’d all gotten each other gifts that they were going to leave under Skipper’s little tree. Richie had let it slip that Skipper hadn’t had a Christmas tree or presents since his parents split when he was about twelve, and Carpenter had felt super shitty about blowing the holiday off the year before. Celebrating consumerism hadn’t meant that much to him back then, and he’d yet to realize how much Skipper did mean to him. Carpenter had always had enough, and more than enough.
For some people, the little ceremony with the presents under the tree was to celebrate the things they had on that day that they hadn’t had for most of their lives.
Skipper and Richie were those people, and Carpenter wanted to be a part of that this year. Watching them fall in love had given him a little bit of hope.
“Huh what?” Dane asked, leaning against him a little. He seemed to like doing that. Since that night on Mason’s couch, Dane had been within touching distance a lot. Carpenter found he didn’t mind. It was… pleasant, having a warm male body nearby.
“I just really admire people like that. People who keep jumping back into the classroom or the hospital room or the wherever, in spite of the fact that their administrators are complete dickheads who need to make it about themselves instead of the student or the patient or whatever.” He sighed glumly. “I always wanted to make the world a better place, you know?”
Dane wiggled against him, and Carpenter’s whole body warmed. Interesting. That was… interesting.
“You do make the world a better place,” Dane said, his voice a sort of low rumble. He was maybe an inch or two taller than Carpenter, but that didn’t stop him from laying his head on Carpenter’s shoulder. “You make it better for me, and I have to say, I’m the six kinds of selfish that thinks that’s seriously okay.”
Carpenter had to laugh. “Skipper says the same thing. Which is funny, because Skipper has more reason to be selfish than anyone, but you should see him take care of the team like the nanny we all know and love.” He pitched the last part of that to Skipper, who was nearby, so Skip would know he wasn’t saying anything mean.
Skip looked up from his conversation with Menendez, the firelight making his handsome Nordic features almost poetic in their beauty.
“I know you’re trying to give me shit,” he said, a thread of pride creeping into his voice, “but I’m already planning next season.”
Carpenter chuckled. “I know you are, Skip. Carry on.”
Skip went back to being the host of his backyard, and Dane snuggled in a little closer. “He’s what Vikings should have been,” Dane said softly. “No wonder my brother was so smitten.”
Carpenter glanced to his other side, where Mason was awkwardly trying not to crowd him some more and Jefferson was advancing on him with a predatory gleam in his big brown eyes.
“Uh, I think your brother may have a new problem,” he murmured, just low enough for Dane to catch. Dane smelled like… cedar wood? Did men wear cedar wood? That wasn’t the firepit, Carpenter was positive. He sort of loved it.
Dane stood up straight enough to let his brown eyes flicker to where Mason was looking bemusedly at pretty, squirrely Terry Jefferson, and then he straightened up completely.
“Mm. Yeah?” he said quietly back, his breath tickling Carpenter’s ear.
Carpenter nodded. “Money down?”
“I wouldn’t take that bet,” Dane returned. “You’re right.”
“Does Mason know it?”
Dane snorted and Carpenter giggled. “Oh my God, you freak, that tickles!”
Dane covered his mouth—and the attractive brown scruff that had started up in the last week or so—and laughed into his hand. “No,” he chortled. “The answer to that question is no!”
“No what?” Mason said, looking over at them with wide, guileless eyes.
“No, we’re not staying at Mom and Dad’s all week,” Dane said, in what Carpenter had to admit was the best recovery ever. “He just wanted to know if I’m going to be around to game.”
“Yeah,” Carpenter said, backing his boy. “My parents usually give me gift certificates to GameStop or Amazon—we should have some of the newer shit to play by the time you guys get back.”
Dane met his eyes, his own sparkling in amusement, and offered him a fist bump.
Carpenter took it, feeling not only virtuous but excited and rushed, like a kid with a secret.
“Do your parents always get you gift certificates?” Dane asked casually, and Carpenter tried not to sigh.
“They… they do,” he said, feeling some of his ebullience fading. He wasn’t particularly looking forward to his dutiful Christmas visit tomorrow. Waking up and having waffles with Skip and Richie? Yes. Going to his parents to have bean-curd-shaped-like-ham? Not so much.
“You got sad,” Dane said, his voice assuming tones of wonder and horror. The two of them backed up, almost like a dance, so they resumed their original position next to each other facing the yard, with the firepit warming their backs and backsides. “Why did you get sad?” he asked, and Carpenter looked out into the darkness beyond their happy little gathering of hot chocolate and sugar cookies.
“Richie’s getting him a dog,” he said wistfully. “That’s his Christmas present. They’re going to go get a dog together, from the shelter. I might even get to come.”
“That’s sweet,” Dane told him, not asking what this had to do with Carpenter’s parents, for which he was grateful. “We could never get pets—my father is deathly allergic. My mother would take me to the shelter to volunteer all the way through high school so I could, you know, get my dog on.”
Carpenter laughed slightly. “We had a dog when I was a kid. After Snoodles died, I wanted another dog so bad. A cat. A gerbil. But it was always a test. Were my grades good enough? Was my room clean enough? Did I improve in soccer, science, reading, math, and thaumaturgy?”
Dane didn’t laugh at the thaumaturgy joke, which told Carpenter that his voice was too shaky with the underlying hurt. “I just… you know. Close, but no cigar. And maybe it was just a way to not have another animal, because animals are giant colossal pains in the ass that shed and shit and eat and knock over trash and stuff. But….”
“But you didn’t care about that,” Dane said. And maybe because he’d gotten his dog on, because he saw animals on a daily basis in the veterinary science department, or maybe because he just really got Carpenter and Carpenter’s heart was sort of wounded, as if seeing his best friend fall in love had shown him what Carpenter was missing, he nodded, completely honest.
“I would have cleaned up all their shit just to have a creature who loved me, however.”
Dane made a hurt sound and leaned on him again. “Maybe you can get a cat,” he said encouragingly. “And then I could come over to your place and visit your cat, since Mace and I aren’t working pet-friendly hours at the moment.”
“If you saw my apartment, I’d kill myself,” Carpenter muttered, thinking about how there were clothes everywhere—and not just clothes. A combination of giant clothes and slightly smaller clothes, and dirty clothes and clean clothes, and shoes to fit his feet when they swelled and shoes to fit his feet when they didn’t, and Skipper’s soccer equipment, and six different gaming systems and—
“Ouch!”
Dane had smacked him on the back of the head.
“That’s real.” His voice was flinty. “I’ve said that to my family and meant that. We don’t use those words unless we want to be dragged into a shrink’s office for six shots of Wellbutrin with a lithium chaser.”
“Wouldn’t that be lethal?” Carpenter asked, appalled.
“Well, I wouldn’t have cared,” Dane snapped back. “Now find another way to say that.”
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Carpenter swallowed back the sarcasm, his heart cracking a little. I’ve said that to my family and meant that. “My apartment is a shithole, and I don’t want you to see it because now you like me.”
Dane cocked his head, as though he’d been speaking in another language. “How bad could it be?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the floor in months.”
Dane’s angry scowl brightened. “So it’s like a treasure hunt? I could come see your house like a treasure hunt? Now you’ve got me super excited to see it! Can I see it now? Can we go today?”
“No!” Carpenter almost backed into the firepit in an effort to get away from that idea. “No! You can’t come see it today! Jesus Christ, I just told you it’s too ugly to see!”
“No—you told me it was a shithole that needed cleaning. I can clean. I’m great at it. We could spend an entire day cleaning your apartment, and then we could game.”
This was not how Carpenter expected this conversation to go. “You’re insane,” he said decisively. “So insane.”
Dane appeared unfazed. “We’ve covered that. Bipolar depression, anxiety—you’ve seen it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help you clean your place.”
“I’m a grown man,” he said with dignity. “I can clean my own place.”
Dane snorted. “Obviously not. Here—I get a month off. You get it to a place where I can come help. And I’ll come help.”
Carpenter dropped his chin to his chest and rubbed the back of his neck. “Dane, man, not even Skipper has seen my apartment.”
“Really?” Dane batted his lashes at Carpenter, and for a moment, between the firelight and the electric lamps hanging from the nearby oak tree, Carpenter got to see Dane’s eyes, and the complexity of brown that they were.
“Really what?” he asked, confused.
“The great and almighty Skipper Keith, slayer of hearts, hasn’t seen your apartment?”
“No,” Carpenter muttered, feeling grumpy. “It’s private.”
Dane’s expression became catlike, and Carpenter just stared at him, mesmerized.
“What?” Dane asked after a moment.
And Carpenter was lost for a manly, strictly heterosexual way to put this. “Your eyes. They’re… just, I need to see them in the sunlight.”
“They’re brown,” Dane said, nodding, like he was humoring Carpenter, which was a hoot because he’s the one who had just agreed to come over to Carpenter’s shitty apartment and play American Maid, like in The Tick.
“They’re a very impressive brown,” Carpenter said, swallowing hard. “I… you know….”
Dane didn’t move, and he didn’t move, and they were standing super close together, and Carpenter didn’t want to put any space between them.
“I know one thing,” Dane said smugly.
“What?”
Dane shook his head, that air of cat-and-canary never leaving. “I’ll let you know when you’re ready,” he said. He turned then, so he was sideways and they weren’t facing each other anymore.
They were still close, but it was buddy closeness, and part of Carpenter relaxed.
Okay.
Better.
Easier.
So much easier.
Buddies. He liked having buddies.
Buddies who breathed softly in his ear and laid their head on his lap when they were watching television.
Buddies who didn’t ask him who in the fuck he thought he was fooling.
“SO, CLAY, how’s your friend Skipper?”
Carpenter shook himself and took a baked whole-grain bagel chip and pretended to dip it in the bean curd thing his mother thought he loved.
“He’s great, Mom. He and Richie moved in together, and Richie got a new job. They’re really happy.”
“Is that why you didn’t bring them by for Christmas?” she asked, smiling hesitantly and tucking back an invisible strand of her carefully frosted updo. She bit her collagen lip and widened brown eyes that were so much like Carpenter’s, he wondered if he’d gotten that gene and that gene only. God. She tried. She tried so hard. And for the last few years, questions like this had usually spurred him to rip her head off, which so wasn’t fair.
He took a deep breath and tried to adult. “I actually stayed the night at their place last night on the couch so he could have sort of a nice little Christmas. A friend, a boyfriend, waffles, presents. I….” He looked around his parents’ house. Yup, still huge. Every room impeccably decorated in winter white and blue, every surface dusted by a woman paid a fair and living wage with health insurance that covered her entire family.
Skip’s mother had been an alcoholic. Richie had paid rent in a tiny room on top of his father’s garage.
Carpenter’s life was not so goddamned bad.
“You had fun?” She sounded needy, and he tried to give her what she needed.
“They’re good people,” he said simply. “They had a party last night. The whole soccer team came. Some friends from work too. Mason brought his brother, Dane—you’d like him. Another sweet guy.” But Dane had some bite, some edge, maybe because Dane’s brain had taken him to some dark places, but Carpenter got dark places. Every chocolate chip cookie and piece of pizza he’d eaten in the last two, three years had taken him deeper into the cave.
“A party?” She brightened. “What did you bring?”
“Sugar cookies and beer,” he told her bluntly. “But at least I bought the cookies.”
Her entire demeanor slumped down, like that artist who drew melting clocks and scissors and things. “Refined sugar?”
“With sprinkles and butter and powdered sugar icing,” he confirmed, driving the knife in a little deeper.
“Oh, Clay….”
“People loved them. Thought they were awesome. They sang my praises.”
Dane had eaten three of them right off the napkin, practically wriggling in excitement, because apparently he liked store-bought better than the ones he’d made. Carpenter wanted to make him wriggle some more, but that sounded a little dirty, and he wasn’t sure what to do with that.
Except… well, wriggling. It was still an important concept.
He turned back to his mother, who looked like she was going to cry, and he felt like shit, but he also felt proud and defiant. It was like when Dane had told him, “Yes, I’m crazy—but that’s not what this is about!”
Yes, he was fat, but that’s not why he’d bought the extra-good sugar cookies. He’d bought the extra-good sugar cookies because he wanted his friends to be happy, and he’d made them happy. Fuck the world if that wasn’t good enough.
“Well,” she said slowly, like this next part was going to hurt, “as long as your friends were happy. I’m so glad to hear you’ve got a social circle.”
“I practice soccer on the weekends when we’re not playing, Mom,” he said in consolation. “Skip is teaching me how to be a better goalie and defender. It’s all okay.” He didn’t tell her about his time in the apartment gym or his efforts at eating a healthy breakfast and lunch, even if his late-night snacking was still a Game of Thrones style Olympic event.
She nodded, her eyes wide and shiny. His father—a solid, distinguished-looking man with most of a head of gray hair—had listened to the entire conversation in silence but now put his hand on her shoulder so she could pat it and be brave.
At that moment, his sister walked in, her two kids at her side, and Carpenter had to call it a win.
He thought he was doing okay. Wasn’t that important?
“UNCLE CLAY, how come you’re so good at Fortnite?” Jason asked as they sat in the game room, side by side.
“’Cause I practice.”
“All by yourself? Because that’s boring, and I can’t get Holly to play with me, and Mom doesn’t let me play with anyone over the headset.”
Great. Sabrina was a fantastic mom. Just like their own mother.
Carpenter wanted a giant chocolate pie with a dripping beef chaser.
“Well, maybe you and me can play during the week. My friend Dane plays with me, and sometimes my friends Skip and Richie and some of the other guys from the soccer team—”
“You play soccer?” Jason said dubiously. “Mom says that for someone your size, running around or exercising wrong can cause injury.”
Carpenter’s eyes narrowed. “I play keeper,” he said. “And sometimes defender. And I’m working on getting smaller.” He looked around the room like a comic book spy, and pulled a small box of cherry-flavored chocolates out of the front of his sweater. Skipper had found them on sale and put ribbons around them and given them out as party favors. He’d pressed one on Carpenter as he’d left that morning as a gift to his mother.
Carpenter had taken them but hadn’t given them to his mom. He had a feeling they’d be needed somewhere else.
“But not today,” he muttered, opening the cellophane with shaking fingers.
“Ooh, is that real chocolate?” Jason asked, lips parted a little. “Mom only lets us have that on our birthdays.”
Carpenter gave him three pieces. “Eat up, kid,” he said. A part of him was ashamed—Shame, shame on you, Clay Carpenter, for giving your nephew the same love/hate relationship with food that you have!
But a part of him was celebrating Jason’s three chocolates of freedom. He set aside another three pieces for Holly, Jason’s twin, and ate another one himself.
Ah, yes.
Freedom.
Freedom Is Slavery
“GO, UNCLE Clay, go!”
Dane smiled, listening to Clay’s nephew cheer him on over the headset. Sometime earlier on in the hour, Holly joined them, but Jason was apparently a really obsessed kid. Or as obsessed as a kid could get, provided he got only two hours of gaming a week. Dane had no problem gaming a little bit with the kids—but he was glad there was a limit.
He settled back into the recliner of his brother’s lovely wood-paneled living room and resolved to beat the crap out of Jason so he and Clay could be alone.