Freckles

by Amy Lane

  And then she piddled on him and didn’t even seem to notice.

  “Aw . . . damn it . . .” But he didn’t yell. He couldn’t yell. How could you yell at something that wet itself with joy?

  Of course, the little piles in the hallway between the pads hadn’t actually been done “with joy,” but he decided he could live with those.

  “Okay, baby,” he crooned, not wanting to think about how the carpet runner down the hallway had once been a pristine cream color. And now was not. “We have to do the thing.”

  The thing. With the carpet cleaner and the brush, and the pee pad.

  He did it all one-handed, with a happy, panting Freckles under his arm. Because someone was excited to see him.

  He’d just changed and put his suit in the dry-cleaning bag when the door rang. Freckles lost her fool head barking, and he padded down the hall with her under one arm and his shoes in his hand. He had to juggle a bit before he could open the door, and when he did, Sandy was laughing.

  Right then, Sandy’s mouth open, his eyes crinkled in the corners, his hands casually in his pockets—that was what it took.

  Suddenly Carter saw Sandy in a way he hadn’t when he’d been so flustered over having a small guinea pig/dog thrust into his hands.

  Oh. This guy wanted to come over and walk his dog with him. And that wasn’t a euphemism, and maybe only a little bit of a come-on.

  “You could hear me?” Carter felt a flush creep up his neck.

  “You were swearing at your shoes.” Sandy winked. “Can I come in?”

  “Oh, uh, yeah. Come in. I, uh . . . well, just got home, really.”

  “I can see.”

  Sandy was wearing pretty much what Carter had changed into—jeans and a hooded gray sweatshirt. Sandy’s read UCD on the front—so did Carter’s.

  “So, uh, vet school?” Carter asked, looking at the sweatshirt and taking in Sandy’s build.

  “Yeah—a couple of units a semester. So, like, the long way.”

  Carter nodded and set Freckles down in her basket before sitting down to put on his tennis shoes. “As long as you make it through.” He’d had the grades and his parents had had the money—but he’d seen enough of his law school compatriots drop out for money problems to know that wasn’t always the case.

  “Or not.” Sandy perched on the arm of the chair adjoining the couch. “I mean, I’ve got a cozy setup right now with two roommates and a two-bedroom apartment. Who needs extra disposable income?”

  Oh, ouch! “Yeah,” Carter mumbled, tying his shoes and feeling useless. “Uh, sorry.”

  “I was kidding!” Sandy told him, smiling. “I mean, not about the poor and the roommates. About the bitter. The truth is, I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do when I got out of school. Took some college classes, worked some waiting jobs. Fucked around a lot. Then I moved in with my first boyfriend, and he was allergic to all animals. All the animals. So I volunteered at a pet shelter, and that led to my vet tech degree, but, you know we make squat so . . .”

  “Onward and upward?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Lawyer,” Carter said automatically. “Boring. Uh, the leash is hanging on the rack by the door.”

  Sandy pinched the bridge of his nose as though he were in pain. God. It wasn’t even a date, and Carter had screwed it up.

  “So,” Sandy said as they made their way through Carter’s neighborhood under the streetlamps. “Your house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your dog is crapping all over your house.”

  Carter let out a frustrated breath, and they both paused to watch Freckles nose at the corner of someone’s yard. “Oh, look, it’s Dogzilla. Dogzilla has crapped here. Come along, Freckles, we don’t talk to dogs that could inhale you. We don’t even sniff their feces, agreed?”

  Freckles shot him a dirty look, and he pretended not to notice.

  “And . . .” Sandy sounded amused, but he also seemed to want a response. Well, hell. He’d warned Carter.

  “Yes. I know. Crate training. I’m sort of hoping that giving her all the opportunities in the world will make her go poop when she has an opportunity.” He thought dismally of the beige carpeting and walls of his office, and how he was going to buy Thanksgiving decorations that Jacobsen would probably rip down.

  Sandy’s outward sigh echoed his own inward sigh, and he didn’t know what to do about that.

  “Look,” Sandy said after a few more silent steps. “I’m not going to lecture you after this. It’s your house—and God knows my own carpet has some shit stains we cannot get out, and that’s because my cat is petty and likes revenge, and after Rick and I broke up, she was pissed, even though she hated his guts. But small dogs are different. For the first six months, she’s not even going to know she’s taking a shit. See?” His voice rose excitedly, and Carter looked down to where the dog was trotting along, pausing every so often to drop a little rabbit poop in her wake.

  “Oh damn it! Here. Hold her. Let me pick those up.”

  He bent to ply the plastic bag, and by the time he was done, Freckles was done, and he could clean up completely. He tied the bag shut and took the leash back so he could secure the bag to the leash and it could sort of dangle until they got home.

  Sandy snorted. “Here, give me that.”

  Like a wraith, he darted up the deserted driveway and put the bag in a stranger’s garbage.

  “But . . . you can’t just . . . That’s someone else’s . . .” Carter sputtered for a few moments more as they continued their progress, and then he realized Sandy was laughing at him.

  “Hey—better their garbage in that nice, neat little air-freshened bag than their lawn, where it will be walked inside onto their carpet, right?”

  Carter made little flailing motions with his hands. “But . . . but I just put dog poop in someone else’s garbage.”

  Sandy chuckled at him some more. “Oh my God! You’re so sweet! Lawyers are supposed to be cynical and everything—you’re like Industrious Hamster or something. I love it!”

  “Industrious Hamster?” This sounded like a title.

  “Have you seen hamsters?”

  “Only in your store.” He’d spent time actively comparing them to his dog to see which one was bigger. She was—but not by much, and a lot of that seemed to be hair.

  “Well, they’re cute and fuzzy and they always seem to have something to do. You remind me of that.”

  Carter felt that flush—the one that had warmed his neck when he’d opened the door—creep up again. This time it sort of fanned out to his cheeks.

  “A hamster,” he muttered. “Wonderful.”

  “And you’re so proper,” Sandy told him. “I mean, I can see a hamster in a three-piece suit—it’s really amazing.”

  Carter fought the urge to wilt into the sidewalk like a dead flower. “Look,” he almost groaned, “I’m not sure why you’re here but—”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Sandy asked.

  “Not to me.” He scowled at the dog, who was rolling around in a patch of what was probably dog pee. “Freckles, stop that. C’mon, baby, that dog cannot be that awesome.”

  “Oh, but he can be,” Sandy argued. “He may seem like a plain brown dog, but he might be warm and kind and fall in love with real dogs at first sight. Maybe he’s responsible and grown-up, but he blushes like a little kid when you tell him something nice. Those are some pretty awesome qualities in a dog, aren’t they?”

  “I have no idea,” Carter said faintly. “I . . . I really am more of an Industrious Hamster, you know.”

  “Hunh,” Sandy said, his feet crunching loudly in the leaves from a neighbor’s tree. “Why won’t you put the dog in a crate again?”

  “Because. Life in boxes. Not fun.” Ugh.

  “How do you know?” Sandy asked—but not like he wanted to know, sort of like he knew already and needed Carter to say the words out loud.

  “Because my job is a box,” Carter said. “It’s a beige box, and we
’re all wearing halters and being jerked to attention, and most of the time we’re doing shit we don’t even like doing. It would be like putting Freckles in a crate and only letting her out to sit in a bigger brown room with no toys. There’s no lawn, no walkies, nobody to scratch her under the chin—just another fricking box. Because school was a box. And life is a box. And just when you think you see a way out of the fucking boxes, it takes off and leaves a note on your table saying, ‘Thanks for not showing up.’ And I like Freckles. She’s been nice to me. I don’t want to do that to her.”

  “Oh,” Sandy said softly. “I see.”

  “I can replace the carpet,” Carter mumbled. “When she figures out what poop is and why I’m yelling at her when she’s doing it.”

  Now his laughter sounded kind. “What does she do right now?”

  “Looks at me as if to say, ‘Oh, isn’t it funny that you’re getting so upset at something. Look at you turn red in the face. That’s hilarious. Are we going to get the spray stuff and the brush now? That’ll be fun too. Can I have treats?’”

  Carter was holding the lead in his right hand, and Sandy was walking on his left. He should have expected what happened next, but oddly enough, it came as a complete surprise.

  Sandy reached out, natural as breathing, to where his hand hung at his side—and clasped it, palms together, twining their fingers.

  Carter almost stopped walking. He almost stopped breathing.

  He asked the obvious question. “Sandy, is this a date?”

  “Is now,” Sandy said casually. “What do you want for dinner?”

  Carter’s brain went blank. “I have no idea, but I had the same thing for lunch two days in a row, so anything other than—”

  “Tomato soup and grilled cheese?” Sandy said, squeezing his hand. “Alexis told me—she was so excited about the business plan that she made it sound like haute cuisine. By the way, that was really human of you, to offer to do that for her.”

  “I’m, uh, meeting with her tomorrow. I’ve a whole start-up plan in my briefcase and—”

  “And you’re going to help her out,” Sandy said. In the light from the streetlamp—and the moon—Sandy’s smile glinted. Carter suddenly wished he could pause and just . . . study that face in the low-level glow. The man holding his hand had a square jaw and high cheekbones—in a way, a lot like Alexis. A bold nose as well. But Sandy also had blond stubble and sort of a wicked casualness. Like this date. Hey, let’s go dog walking and wait—I’m going to try to peer inside your soul!

  “See?” Sandy said, making Carter keep his eyes on his own feet. “Not just a plain brown dog, right?”

  “Mostly an Industrious Hamster,” Carter told him glumly. “Who is out of cheese and only has milk and juice in the fridge.”

  “Hello takeout!”

  The topic changed then to Thai food or Chipotle, or who had decent teriyaki chicken, and Carter had to confess that he didn’t do a lot of takeout.

  “My parents were old,” he said as they rounded the last corner to his house. “Mom cooked pretty much every night, and it was all nutritionally balanced. I just didn’t get into the habit, you know?”

  “Old?”

  Carter was starting to like the way Sandy looked at him when he was watching the dog. It was sly and sort of flirty and interested.

  Sandy seemed interested. Carter wasn’t sure how that could be. He recognized his flaws—milquetoast corporate lawyer, at your service. No partying, no dancing, stayed home at night, and if he was really lucky he caught a new movie on television. No checkered past, not even any flakiness like Sandy professed to have.

  Carter had done everything he was ever supposed to, no deviation from the norm.

  Until a kid had shoved a dog in his hands and vamoosed.

  “Yeah.” Carter paused at the entrance to his driveway. There were other cars out tonight—it was Friday—but for the most part they were moving at a sedate pace up and down his neighborhood street. It was a quiet place in upscale Fair Oaks—well-heeled, relatively new. He was lucky there were sidewalks in this stretch, because a lot of this suburb had been developed without them.

  Sandy paused too and then, keeping one hand in the pocket of his jeans and the other hand clasped around Carter’s, he stood really close. Close enough for Carter to feel the heat from his body. Close enough for their breaths to mingle. Close enough that Carter didn’t feel boring anymore—and he certainly wasn’t bored. In fact, judging from the roar of the blood in his ears, his life had just gotten a lot more exciting: a dog whirlwind, made up of floppy ears and wild fur, with a laughing man with a long jaw and wicked eyes in the center of the storm.

  “Yeah,” Carter repeated breathlessly, trying to remember his topic. “They . . . uh, Mom’s in her seventies now. She’s a mall walker—gonna live longer than me.”

  Sandy was close enough that his chuckle vibrated against Carter’s lips. “That would be a shame,” he said softly.

  Carter stared, mesmerized, into Sandy’s green eyes. “Uh . . . no one will miss me,” he said, quirking up his lips to show it was a joke.

  “I miss you already,” Sandy said. His lips were exquisitely warm.

  Carter had never imagined this moment, never thought about kissing the nice vet tech guy, had never seen it coming.

  It hit him like a train smacking a baseball—he wasn’t so much knocked out of the park as he was plastered against the train’s engine, hurtling down the tracks and screaming in surprise.

  Oh my God—his lips were like magnets or electricity or a speeding frickin’ locomotive!

  Carter moaned, opened his mouth, and let that train hurtle on.

  Sandy took the opportunity for what it was. He moved their clasped hands to Carter’s hip and slid his free hand down to Carter’s backside, which he squeezed. Carter moaned again, and Sandy just kept kissing him, open mouth on open mouth, while Carter’s entire beige life exploded into the colors of one masterful kiss.

  Sandy pulled back a little, teeth nibbling Carter’s lips, and Carter slid his free hand down to cup Sandy’s backside so he could chase the kiss.

  Sandy’s chuckle echoed against Carter’s chest, and everything in his body that mattered—his nipples, his entire groin/taint/ass area, his chest—all of it seemed to swell and tingle, right at the same time. He gasped and jerked against Sandy, groin to groin, and Sandy chased the kiss right back, this time clashing with a hint of teeth.

  Carter could have kissed him forever—and he might possibly have let that happen, on his front lawn on a November night, but he felt a movement and a bounce against his knee, and then another one, and then another one. He pulled away irritably, and Freckles barked.

  “Oh,” he said, feeling dumb. “Dog.”

  “Wants to go in,” Sandy said back. He bent and scooped Freckles into his arms. “Heya, Freckles. How about we take you for a drive, and Uncle Sandy will run into the teriyaki place and get us some chicken and rice?”

  “Yeah?” Carter was so damned glad Sandy had taken point on the whole decision-making thing. “Freckles thinks that’s outstanding.”

  Sandy met him with laughing eyes over Freckles’s spazzy body. “Outstanding enough to drive?” He raised his eyebrows in invitation.

  “Outstanding enough to pay for dinner,” Carter offered, liking the give and take of the conversation.

  “Awesome.” Sandy leaned over Freckles’s wiggling little person and gave him a peck on the cheek, then pulled away and walked toward Carter’s car in the driveway.

  They ate at the kitchen table, with placemats and actual silverware. On the one hand, Sandy had always thought this canceled out the entire purpose of takeout, but on the other, that old-school charm and sensibility of Carter’s that had first captured Sandy’s attention did not seem to go away with time. For a kid who’d been raised on strange hippie food either eaten standing up or in front of the TV, this was high-class, and Sandy sort of loved it. Plain and sturdy, without pretense or cleverness, Carter was everyt
hing he appeared to be.

  As well as being smoking hot and sexy under the surface of all of that.

  That kiss had taken Sandy by surprise. He’d been feeling it creep under his skin as they’d walked. The warmth, the attraction, the need to get closer to Carter’s magnetic center. It was like the mild-mannered contract lawyer was the insulating layer between the man who had kissed Sandy so hotly and the rest of the world. You had to be patient, be willing to put up with a few clumsy starts, not be put off by some awkwardness at the beginning—but eventually you’d be rewarded by a kiss that sort of smacked you in the solar plexus and then just kept going.

  Sandy wanted another kiss, one where their hands just kept mapping each other’s skin and they didn’t stop kissing until Carter cried out in ecstasy and came.

  Suddenly, Sandy very much wanted to see this man lose the quiet Clark Kent exterior and become super-sexy-fucking man that might lie underneath.

  But Clark Kent was the key. Learning what made Clark Kent tick was going to get Sandy in to see super-sexy-fucking man, and Sandy was willing to put in the time.

  “So,” Sandy said over the handsome, shiny-lacquered wooden table. “Any hobbies?”

  The expression Carter cast him was bleak. “Doing research and filling out paperwork?”

  Sandy squeezed his eyes shut. “Carter, you’re killing me, man. Are you trying to prove you’re the world’s most boring human?”

  Carter’s lips compressed, and he gave Sandy a half-resentful, half-hungry scowl. “I just want you to know what you’re getting into. I . . . I mean, I would love to work less.”

  “You don’t seem to like your job.”

  Carter startled, like this had just occurred to him. “I . . . I mean, I like what I do. I like what I’m doing for your niece. I just don’t like who I work for.”

  “Oh.” Sandy shrugged. “Work for someone else.”

  An odd thing happened to Carter’s face then. His eyes grew wide and glazed, and his mouth fell open a little.

  That quickly, Sandy thought about sex. He wanted Carter’s face to look like that after sex with him.