by J. M. Snyder
“Nah, come on down. You’re the next contestant on The Price is Right.” Kyle winks at me. “Seriously, though, Nadia’s at work until five, so mi casa es su casa until then.”
“Thanks.” I follow him down the stairs, relieved I won’t have to sit in the heat of my own place while waiting for the maintenance guy to show up. “I probably owe you dinner, too, after all you’ve done for me today.”
Over his shoulder, he tells me, “Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of some way you can pay me back.”
That sounds like a promise to me.
* * * *
Kyle’s apartment feels like a polar icecap compared to my ninth circle of Hell upstairs. The moment I walk through his door, I go straight to his thermostat—it’s set at seventy-two! “Why’s it feel so great in here?” I want to know.
It’s bright and sunny, unlike my apartment, even though I see he has blackout curtains, too, when he leads me into the living room. But they’re wide open, and so are his blinds. It’s as if the sun somehow shines into his place without heating it. Almost doesn’t seem fair.
“Hot air rises,” Kyle tells me. “The ground floor’s always cooler.”
His apartment is laid out the same as mine, though oddly enough, there’s no fireplace in the corner where mine is, just a large flatscreen TV mounted to the wall that puts Rob’s to shame. The cabinet beneath it is littered with video game consoles and discs—a Wii U, Xbox One, the latest Playstation, even a few handheld devices scattered about. Kyle doesn’t strike me as the type, not with that tan, but I ask anyway, “You a gamer?”
With a shake of his head, he says, “That’s all Nadia’s shit. She gets into a zone where she’ll binge-play nonstop for four months and then forget all about it the rest of the year. As you can see, she’s in the middle of a binge right now. If she didn’t have to work, she’d be camped out on the sofa yelling at us to shut up and let her concentrate.”
Now that he mentions it, I see the Wii U controller nestled among the sofa cushions. “What is it she does?”
“Annoys the hell out of me most of the time,” Kyle jokes. “Oh, you mean for work? She’s a vet tech at an emergency clinic downtown. She said she wanted the room closest to the door because she didn’t want to wake me up coming and going with her crazy schedule. I say she doesn’t want me to know about her booty calls.”
That makes me laugh. “Does she have many?”
He gives me a smirk. “Hello? Look at this shit. Cute girl with a video game habit? That’s every straight guy’s wet dream right there.”
To the right of the sofa, there’s a door off the living room leading to his bedroom. In my apartment upstairs, I have nothing but a blank wall in the same space. But if I expect him to lead me in there, I’m disappointed; instead, he chucks the Wii controller onto the floor and sits down on the sofa, patting the cushion so I’ll join him. His cell phone sits on a coffee table cluttered with magazines—more of Nadia’s mess, I assume, a diverse range of titles from Entertainment Weekly to Smithsonian to Advocate. So I’m a little surprised when Kyle starts to stack them together, muttering half to himself, “Sorry about this. I should’ve cleaned up a little before you came down.”
“Are these all yours?” I reach for the nearest one, the latest issue of People magazine. Not exactly high-brow reading material, but I tell myself it could be worse. It could be US.
Kyle flashes me a quick grin. “Don’t laugh, but I’m sorta kind of a writer.”
“Laugh? Why would I do that?” I let out an involuntary chuckle I quickly suppress. “That’s awesome. What do you write?”
He shrugs. “Anything at this point. I haven’t really been published—at least, not professionally—but I’m trying. I have a few articles online but I’m still hoping to get into print magazines one day. I know they’re a dying breed, but it’s always been my dream to see my name on the masthead of National Geographic.”
“It’s better than the National Inquirer.” I don’t ask him what a masthead is. Maybe he’ll think I already know. “So nonfiction, then?”
“Mostly.” The way he draws out the word makes me glance over, and a thin blush creeps into his cheeks. “Some spicier fiction. Like, you know. That Fifty Shades stuff.”
Now I really do laugh, I can’t help it. “You mean porn?”
“It’s called erotica,” he explains. “Porn is pictures, erotica is stories. That you can laugh about, but it pays the bills.”
Leaning back on the sofa, I give him a knowing smile. “And you’re sure that’s not nonfiction?”
His blush deepens. Turning away, he snatches up his phone and busies himself with looking through his contacts. “I have the emergency number for maintenance right here…”
Tentatively I reach out and trail my finger down the back of his arm. His skin is hot and flushed against mine, but he doesn’t pull away from my touch. “Are you avoiding the question?” I ask.
He shoots me a look over his shoulder. “I’m trying.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Here it is.” He sits back, too, his arm now pressing alongside mine, and holds the phone out to me. When I move to take my phone from my pocket, he shakes his head. “Just call from mine. It’s an answering service, anyway. You’ll have to give your number and they’ll call you back.”
Taking his phone, I press SEND. As it rings in my ear, I say, “Thanks. Hey, can I maybe read one of your stories sometime?”
“You wouldn’t like them,” he tells me. “They aren’t gay, and they’re told from a woman’s perspective, so it’s very girly. I even use a female pseudonym when writing them. Eden Ever.”
I snicker as the phone stops ringing. “So? Sex is sex.”
In my ear, a woman’s sharp voice snaps, “Excuse me?”
I almost drop the phone.
* * * *
The maintenance tech on call doesn’t take too long to get back to me. I’m leafing through one of Kyle’s magazines, trying to convince him to show me his latest sexy story—which he’s still refusing to do—when my cell phone vibrates in my pocket. “Finally,” I say, scrambling to answer. “Yes?”
“Mr. Masterson?” The voice is gruff and masculine, as if I’ve interrupted his afternoon cookout. “I hear you have an A/C problem.”
“Yes! Thank God you called.” I shove the magazine off my lap and flash a quick grin at Kyle. “I just moved in and my apartment’s hotter than I don’t know what. I can’t even start to unpack—”
“What unit are you in again?” the technician says, interrupting me.
With a frown, I tell him, “Apartment G. Ginter Manor. I just moved in.”
“So you said.” He’s quiet for a while—I hear papers rustling, and in the background, faint laughter comes through the phone. Just as I’m about to say something, anything, to remind him I’m waiting, he clears his throat and tells me, “I don’t see you listed as the tenant for that property.”
I look at Kyle, who’s staring at me with a hopeful expression on his handsome face. “What do you mean?”
“That’s an empty apartment,” the tech tells me.
Speaking slowly, as if he’s hard of hearing, I say again, “I just moved in. I got the key yesterday from Shonda—”
He interrupts me a second time. “Well, she didn’t add you to the tenant list, sorry.”
I wait a moment, expecting him to say something else, like maybe, “It’s okay, I’ll pencil you in and be over there in a few minutes, and once I take a look at your lease, we’ll get this all squared away and your air will be up and running, good as new.”
But no, nothing. Just the sound of his heavy breathing and whoever’s laughing somewhere behind him, and some low talking I’m sure is from the television. When Kyle widens his eyes as if to ask what’s going on, I ask the technician, “Hello?”
The guy grunts in my ear. “I can’t come out if you’re not on the list.”
“What? Why not?”
Kyle leans forward, his brows knit t
ogether. “What’d he say?”
I turn the phone away from my mouth. “He can’t come out.”
With a crazed look, Kyle asks, “Why the hell not?”
“Apparently I’m not on the list,” I tell him.
“The apartment’s vacant,” the tech tries to explain. “If I come out for a service call and there’s no tenant listed, I don’t get credit for it. I could lose my job.”
Now I interrupt him. “Bullshit. I live there!” My voice creeps up, but I can’t help it. I’m getting mad. “Yesterday I laid down over a thousand dollars for the key, and I spend all morning moving everything I own into it, and now I can’t even stay there because it’s too goddamn hot. And now you’re telling me you won’t come out to fix the air because the dumb bitch in the office forgot to put my name down on the tenant list before she left for the holiday weekend?”
“Pretty much,” comes the laconic reply.
I’m so pissed, I don’t even know how to respond to that. I want to slam down the phone, but it’d do little good. Sometimes I miss landlines, and cordless phones. It would feel wonderful to chuck the iPhone against the wall…but the momentary pleasure wouldn’t be worth the hassle and cost of having to buy a new one. In the end I just hang up and settle for tossing the phone onto the sofa, hard enough to make it bounce off the cushion onto the floor.
Kyle gives me a sympathetic smile. “So I’m guessing that didn’t go too well.”
I roll my eyes and cross my arms in front of me in full drama queen mode. “The fucking bastard.”
Cautiously Kyle touches my knee. His hand feels warm and comforting; my skin tingles where his rests on it. “This is supposed to be the hottest weekend yet. You know that, right?”
I sigh. I just had to move now, didn’t I? “Tell me about it.”
His thumb rubs a soft spot just above my knee. Without looking at me, he says softly, “You know, you’re welcome to stay here.”
“Thanks, but all weekend?” I ask, skeptical. “I’m sure Nadia would love that.”
With a shrug, he says, “She’ll just have to deal with it. Trust me.”
How can I not? Something in his voice makes me want to melt.
* * * *
As much as I’d love to get to know Kyle more now that I have him all to myself, the truth is I’m exhausted from moving. I was up at the crack of dawn and there isn’t an inch of me that doesn’t ache. Just being on the sofa beside him makes me realize how tired I am, and the longer I sit here, the more it feels like I’m never going to move again. My arms are heavy, my legs sore, my head grows fuzzy…even the magazine in my lap seems to weigh a hundred pounds, and turning the pages is too much work, so after a while I just let it lay there, open to a page of text that blurs together in front of me. My eyes can’t focus on the tiny print, and my ears don’t want to concentrate on what Kyle’s saying. But it isn’t until my chin touches my chest that I realize I’m falling asleep.
“Hey,” he says, shaking my shoulder. “Am I that boring?”
“What? No.” I sit up with a start and the magazine shifts off my legs to puddle onto the floor. I try to stifle a yawn but barely manage to bite it back. “It’s just…I’ve had a long day. As much as I was hoping to unpack a bit after lunch, I think I was really looking forward to a nap more than anything after dropping Rob off. And now…”
With a shrug, Kyle suggests, “You can rest in my room, if you want.”
I look at him askance, trying not to read more into his offer than what’s there at face value. The offer of an empty bed, a dark room, quiet, alone, sleep, that’s all, I tell myself, but it’s hard to ignore the thrill that shoots through me at the thought of lying between sheets he sleeps in himself. “Are you sure?”
“Go ahead,” he says. “I’m not using it. Nadia will be home soon, anyway. Once she’s here, she’ll be back to gaming and you won’t get any rest until she decides to call it a night. Might as well grab what you can now.”
I still don’t move.
Kyle gives my shoulder a playful shove. “Go on,” he says again. “It’s cool. I promise.”
“Alright.” I stand and stretch, and surprise myself by letting out a jaw-cracking yawn. “You know, thanks. For being—I don’t know, just for everything. So far, you’re the best thing about moving here, you know that?”
Kyle laughs. “Just being neighborly. You’d do the same for me.”
“I would,” I say. “In a heartbeat. If you ever want to sweat it out in a sauna, you know where to go. I could turn on the shower, get some steam built up, have ourselves a real sweat lodge up there. It’d be great.”
“Aw, they’ll fix your air first thing Tuesday morning,” he assures me. “You’ll see. Shonda will get it all straightened out.”
In the meantime, though, I don’t mind hanging out here. If I don’t watch myself, I can get used to living with him.
His bedroom is dark and much cooler than the living room, thanks to the curtains drawn most of the way across the window and terrace door. The blinds are down, too, adding to the shade, but I can still see without having to turn on the lights. It’s a typical gay bachelor’s room, neat but lived in—no clothes left lying about, nothing strewn across the floor, nothing out of place. The full-sized bed is nicely made, two pillows and a blue, lightweight summer blanket on top. Two floor-to-ceiling bookcases line one wall, overflowing with books. More books are stacked on both bedside tables, on the top of the dresser, on the waist-high bookcase beside the closet door, and on the desk where Kyle obviously writes. On the desk sits a flatscreen monitor, a CPU tower, a wireless mouse, and a small, wireless keyboard. More books spill onto the desk chair, the top book laid open, as if to hold his place.
I don’t touch anything, but I do walk around, taking a look at the titles on the books. Almost all of them are nonfiction, in a wide range of topics—a few I’ve heard of, the majority I have not. The more books I glance over, the more my opinion of the sexy, blond-haired, gray-eyed frat boy lookalike out in the other room changes. He isn’t anything like I imagined he might be when we first met. Everything about him intrigues me, from the things he reads to the fact that he writes to the hints he’s dropped about his sexuality. I’ve never had a guy tell me he’s gay and not blatantly hit on me, yet Kyle invited me to nap in his bed and didn’t follow me into the room. I can’t believe he isn’t interested in me.
God, please let him be interested in me.
He must be interested in me.
Has to be.
Without turning down the bed covers, I stretch out on top of the blanket and feel my body relax. The day lifts away from me like a weight off my shoulders, letting me sink further into the mattress. I press my nose into the pillow and there he is, the faint scent of his cologne and shampoo an intoxicating mix that fills my senses. I breathe it in, deeply, drawing Kyle into me, into my lungs and my heart and my blood, feeling him move through me like a vapor. My cock stiffens at the scent, my balls ache. I roll onto my side and raise my leg, press my thigh against my crotch—partly to hide my arousal in case he should walk in and see it, but also to feel the welcome weight pinning my dick to the bed where it throbs in time with my pulse.
Oh sweet Lord, I pray, closing my eyes. Already I’m drowsy, enveloped and safe in the warmth of his smell. Please let him want me half as much as I already want him. Is that too much to ask? I mean, seriously?
I don’t think so, not after the day I’ve had.
Thinking of Kyle, I’m half-hard as that day slips away from me and I finally fall out.
* * * *
When I wake up, I know it’s later by the way the sunlight slants under the curtains into the room. It isn’t as bright as it was before, and there’s an orange look to the light that makes me think of early summer evenings and late afternoon naps. My body still aches in odd places, but overall, I feel refreshed and renewed. I almost want to vault out of bed and race out into the living room to start unpacking until I remember I’m not in my own apartmen
t. My stuff is upstairs, slowly cooking in the last of the day’s heat.
I’m lying in Kyle’s bed, alone. I wonder if I called out to him, would he join me? Only one way to find out…
Before I can embarrass myself, though, I hear low voices from the other room. I left the bedroom door open when I laid down earlier, but Kyle must have pulled it partially shut to make sure I wasn’t disturbed. Still, the walls are fairly thin, and I hear video game sounds from the television. I glance around, looking for a clock, then pull out the phone in my back pocket to check the time. Quarter to six.
So Nadia’s home. I must’ve really been exhausted to sleep so long.
Thank God I didn’t call out for Kyle. Jeez, she would’ve never let me live that down.
With a stretch, I ease off the bed and quietly move towards the door. I take a moment to lean against the wall to listen in on what they’re saying. I don’t want to just walk in on something, particularly if they’re talking about me.
Which they are, big surprise there. Nadia sounds distracted, as if her attention is divided between Kyle and the video game. “All weekend?” she asks. I get the impression it isn’t for the first time.
“Just until Tuesday,” Kyle tells her. “His air isn’t working. What do you want him to do, sweat to death?”
She doesn’t answer, the game noises filling the silence between them. Blaster sounds come fast and furious, pewpewpew, against a backdrop of swelling music. Finally she must beat all the monsters in the immediate vicinity because the music cuts off as she pauses the game. “Well, it didn’t take you long to get him in your bed, did it?” she asks.
“Shut up.” But there’s a smile in Kyle’s words, I can hear it, and it makes me grin, as well.
“Is he sleeping there tonight, too?” Nadia wants to know.
So do I, quite frankly. I don’t see anything wrong with that scenario, but I’m not bold enough to ask.
But Kyle’s response is disappointing. “He can sleep on the couch, if he wants.”
And if I don’t want? I think.
I wait for Nadia to say something similar—she seems to be on my wavelength here—but she just makes a noise like, “Hmm,” and unpauses her game.