by Amy Lane
“God, that apartment is small,” he murmured. “We really gotta figure out where we’re gonna live.”
Reg came up to his side and bumped his shoulder. “You guys make enough—maybe just a better apartment?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said with a sigh. “Two bedrooms. That way she has someplace to put her needlework if I move out.” It would give him and his mom something to do after V came back, Bobby figured. Because he was going to need a break from V, even if he loved spending most of his time with Reg.
“When,” Reg said hopefully. “When you move out.”
Oh God. “Sure. When.”
It was as close to a lie as he ever hoped to tell Reg, but he consoled himself with the thought that there was a way to be found.
IT TOOK them less than an hour.
Part of that was because there were five of them, and the other part of it was that all five of them were freakishly strong.
“Jesus, Kane—put the couch down!”
“But Dexter, look—one hand!”
“Great—but it’s gonna crack in two if you don’t let Ethan and Reg get the ends.”
“Bummer. I want a try.”
Bobby grinned at Ethan. “You break it, you bought it. Twenty bucks at the Goodwill, I’m pretty sure.”
Ethan looked speculatively at the couch as Kane brought his other arm up and tried to decide how to lower it, now that he was exactly in the middle.
“I think I’ll keep the money, move the couch, and have the contest in the gym with witnesses. Here, Dex—you get one side and I’ll get the other. Kane, squat so it’s in a good place.”
Kane crawled out from under the couch, crowing with pride. “Looked pretty good, right, Dexter?” He stepped up to Dex, who put the couch down so they could rub noses.
“Yeah, baby. Looked great. Maybe only do that where Frances can’t see, okay?”
“What’s she gonna bench?” Kane asked, entranced. “We could make her little barbells, with stuffed animals on each end, right? Like, buy her a baton and some duct tape and—”
They kept talking while Dex and Ethan lugged the couch out, and Bobby and Reg rounded up the last of the boxes. His mom and Jonah were walking across the meadow as he deposited them in Dex’s truck. Frances was sleeping in her arms. Bobby took in the way she held the little girl, tight and sweet, and thought sadly that she probably would have been a good mom with lots of kids, and a happier mom if she’d had a man she wanted to have those kids with.
“Here,” Kane was saying after Bobby slammed the tailgate shut. “I’ll take her. We’ll be leaving in a few, and we need to get her in the seat.” He gave Bobby’s mom an earnest look. “It’s hard getting her in there in the snowsuit, right? It’s all squishy. But once we bought it, she wanted to wear it up here. I swear, Dexter and I froze the whole way so she didn’t melt.”
“We had a snowball fight,” Isabelle said, keeping her hold still. “She had so much fun.”
Kane grinned, and Dex walked from the truck to lean over his shoulder to brush Frances’s cheek with his gloved fingers. “Aw, sleeping bunny. Did we pet the horses?”
“Forever,” Jonah complained good-naturedly. Ethan—per usual—was all over him as he walked up, hanging over his back, mauling him in hugs. Jonah turned around and hugged him, staying snug in his arms. “Seriously, Kane—she kept saying, ‘But they don’t have scales!’ You gotta get some normal animals, man!”
“Lizards are normal!” Kane defended. “It’s the furry things that’re weird.”
Bobby came over to his mom and put his arm around her shoulders. “You gotta give her back, Mom. We can stop for lunch in Auburn if you want—she should be awake then.”
His mom gave a small smile. “Well, I understand your friends are about to be neck-deep in babies. Maybe they’ll need a sitter.”
Kane took Frances this time, although Bobby’s mom’s eyes still looked pretty bright. “Are you kidding? Most of our friends still need a sitter. You guys get a decent apartment, you’ll be neck-deep in giant goombahs who need a mommy.”
Isabelle looked around at all of them, obviously surprised. “Vern,” she said faintly, “you haven’t introduced me to your friends.”
THEY ATE in Auburn, and Bobby and his mom treated because everybody else had put themselves out to help. After that Ethan led the way to the apartment, while Bobby and Reg unloaded the furniture into the storage unit. By the time they got to the apartment, everybody else had gone, and Isabelle was sitting at the little table, looking around bemusedly.
“Your friends are really nice,” she said, nursing a fresh mug of coffee. It was the only appliance Bobby had bought.
“They really are,” Bobby said, setting the pizza he’d bought on the table. Reg got some milk out of the refrigerator, and they sat down to eat. “Wan’som?” Bobby asked through a mouthful.
“God, Vern—we only ate about four hours ago. Give me some time. I’ve got a question, though,” she said, sipping her coffee again. She looked happy there, in front of the boxes of all her possessions.
“Yeah, sure.” Bobby swallowed and smiled invitingly. “Hit me.”
“How come none of your friends know you’re a couple?”
Reg choked on his pizza until Bobby had to thump him on the back.
HIS MOM insisted he spend the night at Reg’s—told him frankly that she’d rather be alone with the strange night sounds in the cheap little apartment than see Bobby sleeping on the couch with his feet hanging off.
She also told him that she felt free there, and she wanted to see what that was like.
Bobby thought that was probably closer to the truth.
They walked into Reg’s house and turned on the lights and adjusted the thermostat, before hanging up their coats and pulling off their boots to shake off the cold. Bobby was standing, hand on the coat hook by the front entryway, when Reg walked in and wrapped his arms around Bobby’s waist. Bobby lowered his lips and kissed the top of his head, holding him close and enjoying the warmth of his body.
“Mm….” Bobby closed his eyes. “I needed this all day.”
“Me too.” Reg took a deep breath and let it out. “Why don’t we do this in front of other people?”
Bobby kept his eyes closed. He’d known this was coming as soon as his mom had asked the question. “I don’t know,” he said. He was picturing the thousand-and-one touches he’d seen that day. Dex, looking over Kane’s shoulder at the baby, close enough to rest his hand in the small of Kane’s back. The way they’d rubbed noses, like nobody else could see. Ethan, hanging on Jonah like a giant floppy spaniel who would need pets forever and ever, and Jonah turning around to pet him.
“It’s just… this thing… I mean, we can’t touch in front of V,” Reg said softly. “But it’s more than that. It’s private.”
Bobby didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to think it. “I think it needs to become public before I move in.”
Reg tightened in his arms, but Bobby didn’t let him go.
“I’m not breaking up with you,” he said, voice harsh. “And I’m not giving you an ultimatum. But Reg—Reg, I know who I want to be. I know who I want us to be. And I know it’s going to take a while for you to put your finger on it. But when you do, let me know, okay?”
“Don’t break up with me,” Reg whispered.
“Right back atcha,” Bobby told him, holding him tighter.
“Don’t give up on me.”
“Not going anywhere.”
Reg pushed up in his arms then, taking his mouth, and Bobby responded right back. The quiet evening Bobby had in mind melted away in the heat of Reg’s hands on his body, in the franticness of his touch.
Bobby put a hand on either side of his neck and touched foreheads. “Easy,” he whispered. “Easy.”
Reg nodded, trembling, and Bobby turned him toward the bedroom, close and dark, where they touched all the time, and both of them knew the rules. Their clothes hit the floor in a jumble, and Bobby laid Reg down, feet
in the air, and grabbed the lube from under the pillow.
“Fast,” Reg begged, naked, stroking himself, shameless. “Just… fast.”
Fast and now, Bobby knew. Because they’d both heard it, what could be the death knell of them, the thing that could break them apart. It’s got to be you, Reg, Bobby thought as he stretched Reg, slicked him up, made him ready. You’ve got to do it. I can’t help you.
Reg groaned, shaking, and Bobby thrust in. For a moment Reg’s grip on his cock was completely overwhelming, as he’d prayed it would be. Oh yes—it was them. It was only them. It was Bobby and Reg, and they were the bright light in the center, and the universe whirled around them. Bobby began to thrust, letting that light wash over him, letting their pleasure become the only thing that mattered.
Beneath him Reg shook, he trembled, he screamed Bobby’s name and only Bobby’s name. There was nothing between them, not flesh, not doubt, not family.
Reg’s back arched so hard he came off the bed, his impossible angle hitting Bobby just right. Bobby cried out, groaned, and fell forward, coming that quickly, too quickly, because the white light would fade, would drain from them like come, and they would be left, just their heartbeats, alone in the darkness of an uncertain world.
A Different Normal
V CAME home in late April—and John came back to Johnnies about two weeks earlier.
Reg would remember the dates as seeming to be so close together, because life without V and John had become the new normal before then, and although he missed them both, the new normal was really so wonderful he didn’t have a way to put words to it.
Bobby and his mom found a new, better apartment with two bedrooms. It wasn’t too expensive, because his mom was finding work. She had a job with a temp agency, but finances were solid since Bobby was working two jobs. His mom still wasn’t awesomely excited about one of them. Bobby told Reg that she frequently tried to feed him extra during his three-day abstinence, and Bobby spent a lot of time boxing up leftovers to give to the street people who could be seen searching the dumpsters in their neighborhood, but she wasn’t mean about it either. In fact, she was pretty nice to his friends as a whole. She had Dex and Kane over for dinner, as well as Ethan and Jonah, and Lance and the other guys from the flophouse.
Bobby said she’d never had so many people to cook for, and between his two jobs and the temp job, they were making enough money for her to cook.
There were also about ten million craft stores in Sacramento, Bobby said—Reg wasn’t sure about his math—so the number of boxes in the spare room had gone up as well.
And most of the time it was a spare room.
Bobby would finish waiting tables and come over to Reg’s and work on the house. He completely replaced the fence and dug out the backyard to plant grass seed. By April they had a nice carpet of grass in the back, some starting in the front, and he’d replaced the floors in the hall and was taking measurements for cabinets in the kitchen.
“Do you know how to make cabinets?” Reg asked apprehensively. It seemed like someone who knew how to make cabinets should probably not be in porn.
“No,” Bobby said, frowning as he wrote the measurements down on paper. “But I know how to install them. I’d need you to pitch in on the having them made, but we could rip them out and replace the flooring, then put in the new ones.”
Reg had looked around his crappy kitchen with big eyes.
“I got no idea how to do all that.”
“Well, I do—but it’s going to take two of us and….” Bobby bit his lip and grimaced, and Reg knew what he wasn’t saying.
He didn’t want to do it with V there.
Well, Reg couldn’t blame him. Did they have, like, boarding places for people with schizophrenia? So, like, she could go live there for a month, like a vacation, while they had hammers and saws and whatnot all over the house so they could fix the floor and install the cabinets?
Probably not, Reg reflected glumly.
So Reg just said he’d help pay if they could manage to do it, and Bobby found other things to fix. By the time April had rolled around, they’d repainted V’s walls—the same color pink, but without the graffiti—and Bobby was replacing baseboards and window treatments, and that seemed like it was going to take him a long time. The thing Reg noticed, though, was that every time he replaced a window treatment—like with blinds or curtains or something—the whole rest of the wall looked like crap.
Reg figured painting the house was going to be their thing in June, because Bobby should be done with sealing the house to help the air-conditioning and heating by then.
He liked helping Bobby.
He remembered all the times he’d ended up screwing around with someone because he couldn’t think of anything better to do. Bobby would take him to movies or to the bookstore, or to live music in downtown, and Reg loved that.
But the other times, the times they weren’t fooling around—and there were lots of the fooling around times; Reg narrowly avoided blowing his abstinence more than once—they spent fixing the house. Reading. Watching television.
Sure, they hung out with friends separately. Reg went to Ethan and Kelsey’s house a lot. She was getting close to having the baby; she needed him to bring lots of stuff. Bobby hung with his mom. But most of their time was together, and it was awesome, and Reg didn’t want to fool around with anybody else because that meant he couldn’t spend time with Bobby.
Apparently being in a relationship was that easy.
But it sure did make porn hard.
“Uh, Reg,” Dex said blankly. “Do you have that thing out for a reason?”
“Yeah, Dex,” Reg said. “I’m fluffing, right? When you’re done with the lights?”
“Been done for about ten minutes, buddy. We’re waiting on you.”
Reg looked down at the thing in his hand. He’d been petting it for the last ten minutes, but it didn’t see Bobby anywhere, so it didn’t think it was going to get any use.
“Uh…,” he said, looking at his cock and feeing stupid. Sex. On camera. He’d been doing it for eleven years. He looked over at “Chris”—and again, he didn’t feel so bad about his shitty porn name situation—and back at his dick.
Chris was a sweet kid, blond, blue-eyed, sort of like a young Dex, complete with baby fat around the chin. But the older Dex was stacked and ripped, and he had this sort of dangerous self-knowledge around the eyes. Reg could probably bang Dex now, if Dex still did scenes, and like Lance, they’d shake hands and walk away, like guys on a bowling team.
But this new guy, Chris….
Reg looked back at his dick.
“I suck cock like a dream,” Chris said sweetly. “Man, I seriously converted the quarterback at my junior college. He totally plays for our team now.”
Reg grinned at him and stripped off his pants before folding them to stash on the shelves. He followed up with his shirt and grinned at the angel with the apparently filthy mouth. “Wanna start there?” he asked Dex. “Him deep-throating me? I bet I could get it up then.”
“Sure,” Dex said easily, kicking back. “Go to it!”
It worked. Chris’s mouth was everything advertised and more, and they laughed a lot while they were fucking. But when they’d finished up and had filmed the shower scene—which had ended up with Reg fingerbanging the kid against the wall, because he had a sweet ass too—Dex waited until he was coming out of the locker room to pull him aside.
“So, Reg.”
“Yeah?”
Dex rolled his eyes. “Anything on your mind?”
Reg tried a grin. “You know me better than that,” he said.
“No.” Dex shook his head. “You don’t get to pull that shit on me. What’s up?”
Reg shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “I don’t know. Guess, you know. Got that thing out and it was expecting someone else.”
That got a laugh, and Reg was glad. He was getting better at eliciting a laugh from people—it was worth trying. “Anyt
hing else?” Dex asked quietly.
Shift. Shift. Shift. “My, uh, sister’s coming home next week,” Reg said, gnawing on a cuticle. “You know. Don’t know how much longer me and someone else got.”
Dex looked away and sighed. “Reg…,” he said, in that pained tone of voice Reg knew by now.
“No.” And he couldn’t smile about this. “Thanks for filming the scene, Dex. You did a real good job.”
“Wait a sec!” Dex waylaid him with a hand on the arm. “About filming scenes. You think, maybe, not your thing anymore?”
Reg gnawed on another cuticle because the first one was bloody. “You think of something a guy who barely finished high school can do that gets him health and dental, you let me know,” he said honestly. Oh God—he was gonna be thirty. “And I’m not great with animals. I mean, I know Tommy’s at PetSmart and stuff, but I may get a dog someday, and that’s gonna be the end of it, you know?”
Dex nodded, looking sober and a little sad. “I hear ya. Look, just hang on, okay? I’ve got a thing I want to do. John’s coming back in a couple of days—I think he’ll help. It’s so, you know, guys who work here have maybe something to do when they’re done working here.”
Reg smiled, but even he recognized the bitterness. “That sounds real nice and all, Dex, but we both know those plans are for other guys. Not me.”
He turned away then and walked out. Bobby was waiting for him with a special meal he’d cooked all by himself, and movies, and generally some peace and quiet. Reg, who used to be able to go out and fuck himself raw after a scene, thought peace and quiet with Bobby was about the best dream a guy like him could have.
“I WANT to go back to the place.”
Reg stared at his sister, uncertain. “V?”