by Amy Lane
“That’s not the—”
“Or that he doesn’t make enough money. Think about that. You have essentially tried to shame your brother because of his weight, which does make you a horrible person, and for his job, which makes you a mildly awful one. And he thinks you walk on water. How do you feel now?”
She swallowed. “Awful,” she confessed. “Do my parents know he’s bi?”
Dane’s mouth twisted. “He barely knows. So maybe, if you really want to make up for being a flaming bitch, you can keep that one little detail to yourself.” Not because Dane was ashamed, but because he had this sudden sense that Carpenter really was the odd duck out in his own family.
To his surprise, she nodded. “Thank you,” she murmured, “for helping him with them. It….” She wiped her eyes on her sweatshirt, like a human being, and he felt another reluctant tug of sympathy. “It was kind.”
“I was happy to do it,” he said. “I’d love to help, anytime I’m free. And that’s the truth.” He really did like kids—even hers.
Her mouth pursed in at the sides. “Apparently so. You don’t seem particularly afraid of the truth.”
Dane grimaced. “Yeah, well, I’m very protective of your brother. I’ll babysit for free, just don’t hurt him.”
“Understood,” she said, and she looked exhausted, so he took that as his cue and left her there, shutting the door quietly behind him.
He wasn’t sure if that was going to do any good—or any harm—but he knew it made him feel better.
An apple pastry and almond milk wasn’t a bad combination. The kids were legit tired and buzzed after the morning, so doing the jigsaw puzzles afterward wasn’t a bad thing—it calmed them down, made them Zen, gave them a mental reboot. They set up in the living room, the big puzzle on the maple wood coffee table, the smaller puzzles on some cardboard flats on the floor. The kids would show Dane and Clay pieces when they got stuck.
“See that one?” Clay said patiently. “That’s an edge—now look at the color. Which part of the picture does it match?”
“Ooh,” Holly said. “That’s a good way to look! Thanks, Uncle Clay!”
“You’re really patient,” Dane said in admiration when Holly was absorbed in her task again. “I suck at giving directions.” His contribution had been mostly, “Turn them all so the picture is facing up. Yeah, after that it’s all luck.”
Clay smiled a little. “Well, two years of listening to Skipper help people in IT helped. He will walk the dumbest people through the simplest steps. I’m like, ‘Turn it off. Now turn it on again. Yup, magic.’ And he’s like, ‘Now, if you do this, and then this, and then this, and then reboot, you could solve the problem completely.’ Puts me to shame.”
“Good teachers are hard to find,” Dane said. “I had this one professor who pretty much told us we were all gonna fail because none of us were as smart as he was. Good times!”
Clay cocked his head and found his piece. “Did you fail?”
Dane shrugged. “No. For one thing, I was smarter than he was—and I had receipts. All that testing I did in school wasn’t bullshit.”
Clay snorted. “Genius. Excellent. I’ll crawl in a hole now.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not why I passed.”
Clay must have heard the thing in his voice that he’d put there deliberately, because he looked up from where he put the puzzle piece with wide eyes.
And parted his lips.
Dane waggled his eyebrows. Yes, he’d blown the guy into submission, and he wasn’t ashamed. Prick. No telling how many people that guy had put off molecular biology for life. Dane considered ten sweaty, unpleasant minutes on his knees listening to the guy grunting, “But I’m not gay!” to be one of the finest acts of public service he’d ever performed in his life.
And Clay saw it—saw the sexual innuendo, the carnality, the complete lack of repentance—and didn’t express horror. Didn’t say, “Oh God, that’s awful!” Didn’t say, “You did not!” or “That’s cheating!”
Nope.
Clay Carpenter saw that look on Dane’s face, bit his lip, and blushed.
Dane couldn’t deny the hopeful, sexual, insistent buzz that had started in his chest and warmed his skin. It settled in, like hot chocolate into your stomach on a cold day.
Way, way, way better than almond milk.
The kids fell asleep, facedown on the floor, the puzzles around their heads, and napped there for a good half hour. Right up until Clay’s mother came down and tsked them all up.
“Come on, you two. Pick up your toys. Go lie down in your beds!” she urged, and Dane met Clay’s eyes as the kids grumbled peevishly and started to do what she said.
“Holly, you missed a piece!” Cheryl Carpenter called as Holly trudged up the stairs.
“I got it, Mom,” Clay told her. “I’ll put it on top of our box after we clean up.”
They were almost done, actually, and given it was one of those super-busy puzzles with a thousand tiny black-lined pussycats staring forward with that super-judgy look that cartoon cats got, Dane was reasonably proud of the two of them. Holly’s puzzle was a bright pink Barbie abomination; there would be no confusion.
“Why would you let them nap down here, Clay?” his mother admonished. “They’ll be hyper tonight—”
“We’ll run them around before dinner,” Clay appeased. “Here. Meet Dane. He’s got the puppy-dog eyes. Everybody loves him.”
And with that, Clay shoved Dane unapologetically at his mother, and Dane grinned and put on the charm.
Cheryl was a trim woman, with frosted hair pulled up off the back of her neck in an elegant twist. Like Sabrina, she was dressed in what Dane thought of as “mall sweats”—a pale blue leisure suit that would look appropriate doing something social and active. And yet she was wearing it in her home when she wasn’t feeling her best.
Dane had seen some of Carpenter’s “not feeling great” sweats when they were cleaning up his room. They’d been full of holes and hanging in tatters, and Dane was starting to see that entire scenario as Clay’s giant finger in the face of his parents. Well, there was a cost to perfect. Dane could see that now.
“So nice to meet you,” Dane said, prepared to lie his ass off in the name of love. “Clay thinks the world of you.”
“Well, we’re feeling very blessed. Clay brought his friend Skipper here for Thanksgiving, and now we’re getting to meet another friend.” She gave her son a look of gentle reproof. “It’s like he’s trying to prove he has them.”
Clay’s begging look at Dane said everything. “Well, he has a lot more—I’m just the only one who wasn’t playing soccer this morning. Everybody else had to go home and scrub off all the mud.”
“Why weren’t you playing?” she asked, her lips quirking up, and Dane’s stomach relaxed infinitesimally. That was a smile there. He’d obtained a parental smile. He was usually good with parents—had, in fact, been called back by the occasional hookup over holidays so he could appease a worried mother or overprotective father into thinking their dear, sweet little gaybie wasn’t a complete and total disaster who would frighten a serial killer into running in the opposite direction.
Dane was pretty sure he’d dated every one of those guys the Bay Area had to offer. He told himself it’s why monogamy hadn’t been his thing in the last few years. Since the diagnosis. The last few years since the diagnosis. But he had dated a lot of jerks.
And he sure did know how to fool the ’rents.
“I’m more of a yoga and swim guy,” he told her truthfully. He used the school pool every morning when it was open to the student body, and he had yoga tapes for his room. “Me and kicking the crap out of a ball—not really my thing.”
That lip quirk deepened, and Dane was pretty sure he saw dimples. Oooh… how hard would Carpenter have to smile—and how clean would he need to be shaved—for Dane to see dimples?
But Clay’s mother wasn’t that much of a pushover. “Well, healthy competition can inspire us to p
ush against our limits and excel, don’t you agree?”
Dane almost did it. He almost sold his soul with that one. He smiled, and his eyes widened, and his mouth opened, and he said, “Oh God, no.” Then he clapped his hand over his mouth and looked to where Clay had let out a snort that could have waked the dead. “No,” he repeated, still horrified that this was what he was saying. “Healthy competition kicks my stress into high gear. It terrifies me. I either get unhealthily obsessed with beating my score or my performance or my original baseline or something, or I stress about how I’m failing at life and that makes my mood swings super radical, and then I have to quit. No. No, there is no such thing as healthy competition for some of us. There is only doing the things that are good for us to the best of our ability. Competition is a bad idea. Bad. No. Don’t do it.”
He looked wildly around to see if he should run outside and hitchhike home because he was no longer welcome in the palace-o-perfection, and was stunned to see Clay, eyes dancing above the hand in front of his mouth, staring at him with something like worship.
And Clay’s mother was laughing in a mostly horrified way—but still laughing.
Oh, thank God, Dane hadn’t lost his touch.
“Well, that’s… unusual,” she said. “Isn’t that unusual, Clay?”
Clay dropped the hand in front of his mouth, and for a moment, he looked stricken, like a possum in front of headlights. Dane winked at him—he could do this! Articulating a real emotion in front of his parents was within his grasp.
“Uh, no,” he said, the words sounding strangled. “That’s actually how we play soccer.”
Dane gave him a grin and a thumbs-up, but inside, he was thinking that he sort of wished he’d been the inspiration for that epiphany, and not big dumb Skipper’s violent dumb game.
“What do you mean? Don’t you play to win?”
Clay shrugged. “Well, of course. But mostly we just play to play. I mean, Mom—these guys aren’t pros. They don’t have scads of time to practice. They just like to get together and play. It’s fine. We have fun. Dane’s brother is our defender—or he will be in a couple of weeks after his ankle heals. He’s not great. He’s sort of….” He grimaced in Dane’s direction.
“A gawky mess who fell over like a tall tree. Timber. Like—” Dane put his hands up to his mouth. “Tiiiiiiimbeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrr…. It was amazing. I’ve never seen anybody fall like that.”
Clay smirked. “It really was sort of amazing,” he conceded. “But the best part….” His eyes darted quickly to his mother, and Dane grimaced. Well, he was in it now. Dane gave him a nod. “The best part was his boyfriend, who sort of wanted to ride to his rescue and get him off the field.”
Dane couldn’t help the guffaw that escaped. “Oh my God. Yeah. That was great!”
“What was so funny about it?” Cheryl asked, puzzled.
“Well, Dane’s brother is super, super tall and like a tree, and Jefferson is about five foot six, and he drives this dinky little Toyota that was just barfing black smoke all over the field. So he rides down, and we have to fold Mason into a pretzel to get him into the car—”
“And the big moo was so happy to have a knight in shining armor!” Dane broke in. “He was like, ‘Yes! This is fine! Isn’t he wonderful! No, the super-swollen ankle doesn’t hurt at all!’”
“And Dane’s horrified, right?” Clay said. This was their rhythm, the part about them Dane loved the most. The way they talked off each other, like they shared the same brain. “He’s like, ‘We have a Lexus,’ and Mason is not getting it. Not even at all.”
Dane shook his head, the story winding down. “And you finally had to say ‘Let it go, Dane. Just let it go.’ And they went jouncing off the field, my brother’s head hitting the ceiling of that damned car with every bump.”
“But he was okay?” Cheryl said, and that’s sort of when Dane got it. Fussy. Yes, she was definitely fussy. And obsessed with perfection. But she cared about Dane’s brother, whom she had never met.
Sort of like when Sabrina had been horrified her brother might have heard what her children said.
These people weren’t monsters.
But they were… difficult, if you were just a big solid guy who liked to play soccer and have a beer with friends after work. Sometimes that very simple thing was the lynchpin of civilization—or at least the cornerstone of a lot of other people. Trying to “refine” or “improve” that formula was like adding all those different flavors to chocolate chip cookies. Sure, that one batch was a lot of fun, but the next time Dane and Carpenter made cookies, they weren’t going to throw in random shit again because they liked the tried and true.
Tried and true was what the world needed sometimes.
“He’s at home right now,” Dane said. “And his boyfriend is probably spoiling”—fucking!—“him senseless.”
Clay made a suspicious sound, and Dane shot him a dirty look. Dammit, he was about to close this deal with the fussy mother, and he was about to have her approval so that Clay wouldn’t have to work quite so hard to earn it for himself.
It was absolutely imperative that neither of them thought about what Mason and his squirrel-bait boyfriend were really doing right now.
“Is his boyfriend as nice as you are?” Cheryl asked, beaming.
“Sadly, no,” Clay said, his eyes kind and sparkling as they met Dane’s. “Dane is sort of special, Mom. I don’t know if Jefferson can live up to that with anyone but Mason.”
Dane cocked his head and gave his best coquettish smile while looking at Clay sideways. “Do you really think I’m special?” he vamped.
Clay rolled his eyes. “Do you really imagine you’re not?”
Dane grinned and did a little dance as he sat.
“Well, I’m just glad Clay has friends like you and Skipper,” Cheryl continued, puncturing Dane’s happiness just a little. “It would be lovely if he brought a girl here someday, but I’m glad he seems to be happy.”
Dane’s eyes widened in outrage, and Clay covered his mouth again and chortled softly into his hand.
THEY MUDDLED through.
True to Clay’s word, Clay and Dane took the kids out and played Frisbee and whiffle ball in the huge backyard for an hour before dinner. Dane wasn’t sure about the kids, but he was good and tired by the time dessert had been served and he and Clay made their polite goodbyes.
“Oh my God,” Dane groaned, collapsing into the front seat of the SUV. “I’m exhausted. How do parents do that all day?”
Clay snorted as he backed the vehicle out of the drive. “Well, Sabrina hires help, I think, but yeah. It’s not for the faint of heart. Jason and Holly are sweet kids—”
“Well, they’re kids,” Dane corrected. Kids were often spoiled and peevish and selfish—but that didn’t make them bad people. It just meant they didn’t have a whole handle on that social niceness thing yet.
“Well, they could be worse kids. I went to their soccer games last fall. There were some absolute gems in that batch of entitlement, I shit you not. But Sabrina tries to keep them grounded.” Clay let out a breath. “I mean, I don’t know if she realizes what ‘grounded’ means. Yeah, she’s an oncologist, but she also works in one of the swankiest hospitals with all of the experimental treatment. I mean, this isn’t Cook County or LA General, you know?”
“Gotcha,” Dane said, knowing what he was talking about. Clay piloted the big Ford Explorer easily through the Rocklin suburb toward Highway 65. “Can I ask you something personal?” He was only halfway kidding.
“Sure.” Clay’s voice softened.
“What’s your degree in?”
“Nothing special,” Clay evaded, and Dane scowled.
“You know, this is an absolutely stupid thing to shine me on about—” It had been obvious he’d cut Sabrina off before she could finish what she was saying.
“What did you say to my sister when I left?”
Uh-oh. “I told her what a good time the kids had,” Dane lied, his sweete
st smile on his face.
“Really? She looked really afraid of you when we were eating dinner.”
“I don’t think she felt very good,” Dane temporized. But it was the truth—one of the reasons the two of them had bolted out of there had been that the women still didn’t look like they were feeling wonderful, and Clay’s father had been tired from work. They were welcome, but nobody was in much of an entertaining mood. Sabrina had given him a brief smile as he was leaving, though, and told him he was welcome to babysit anytime.
“Yeah, that’s true.” Clay sighed. “I’m just really glad nobody asked the kids about my soccer game. That would have been embarrassing.”
“Why? You guys were great. It’s not like it was a blowout or anything.”
“Yeah, but… but it’s kind of condescending, you know? ‘Oh, Clay, bringing your friends here! How sweet! How’s your soccer game, honey? When are you gonna get a real job?’”
Dane laughed like he was supposed to. “Yeah, but how else are they going to be? I mean, they’re not going to get it—or you. Clay, you’re… I mean, your parents are smart.” They were educated and spoke really well about politics and current events. They’d reminded Dane of his parents in that way; they moved about in the world like they were part of it and had a say. “And your sister probably is too. But they’re not as quick as you. Not as funny—”
“So I’m a smartass. So what?”
Dane wanted to shake him. “Because you’re a smart ass. It’s like… like with Skipper. You know that his tech certificate is a big deal to him. Yeah, we both think he’s smart enough to do more, but you get, like with your heart, why you’d want to be careful explaining that to him. Because he didn’t have the same shit you and me had growing up.” Dane didn’t know particulars, but Clay had told him that much. “It’s… wait. I know what this is called.” He closed his eyes and tapped one of his many, many psych courses. “Intrapersonal intelligence. It means you are really good with people on a one-on-one basis—”
“Not always,” Clay said, self-recrimination harsh in the quiet of the car. “It… it took me a while. To look beyond myself, right? Like, I gave him gift certificates to my favorite donut place for Christmas as sort of a joke—I mean, work Christmas pool, right?”