by John Inman
Joe wished he could remove his shoes and socks and walk barefoot down the darkened path, enjoying the feel of cool dirt and cushiony pine needles between his toes, but he knew he couldn’t. People were stupid. They dropped bottles and trash along the park trails. If he walked here in the dark without shoes, he’d probably slice his feet to ribbons and end up with lockjaw.
As quickly as that thought reared up, he just as hurriedly pushed it away. Tonight was not the night for being peevish or morose. He was about to meet up with Ned, and meeting up with Ned always made him happy.
Joe stumbled to a stop in a patch of darkness so deep he couldn’t see a thing. He stood there in the shadows, enjoying the sensation of being invisible, and a smile stretched his mouth wide. He had been smiling a lot lately when he thought of Ned. It was a smile of wonder as much as happiness. It was a smile of slowly dawning surprise too. Surprise at Ned. Surprise at himself. And most of all, surprise at the way the two of them got along.
The last thing Joe Chase thought he would ever seek out was a friend. He had spent his life avoiding friendships. It wasn’t that he hated people. He just didn’t enjoy their company. Or at least he hadn’t enjoyed their company until Ned came along.
Joe had seen Ned around the apartment building, of course. Heck, they lived right next door to each other. Sometimes one would be coming in while the other was going out, and they would casually speak, since there was really no graceful way not to.
Joe knew Ned was shy. Joe wasn’t shy, but he could recognize it in someone else. No, Joe’s self-imposed seclusion from the human species wasn’t brought on by shyness. It was brought on by the fact that he simply didn’t need people. He had acquired his self-reliance through long years of loveless but dutifully caring foster homes when he was a kid and through a few tumultuous years of being bullied in school. The bullying came his way because he was different, and Joe understood that. It didn’t mean he had to like it, though. And with a little help from a favorable chromosome or two in his DNA strand that gave him muscle definition and some serious length of bone by the time he was fourteen, he learned he didn’t have to like it. As soon as the other kids knew bullying Joe Chase was asking for a black eye and maybe a few missing teeth, they didn’t bother him anymore. And that was the way Joe liked it.
It was the way he still liked it. At least it had been until the day Ned Bowden stepped into his life. Astonishingly, it was on that very day that Ned began to fill an empty niche in Joe’s psyche. There had been a vacant spot inside him all along, it seemed—a spot that needed caulking; a spot that Joe had never known was there. Had never imagined was there. Until Ned came along.
Yet it didn’t take Joe long to realize that simply patching the empty holes in his life with Ned’s friendship wasn’t enough. He knew the time was quickly approaching when he would have to do something more. If for no other reason than to give himself a little peace of mind. Still, had he read all the signals wrong? Would he be making a cataclysmic mistake? If he took the actions he wanted to take, would it be the end of their friendship altogether?
God, he was so tired of worrying about it. As momentous as the idea was, he still tried now and then to push it from his mind. Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he didn’t. Tonight he sort of did. At least for a while.
Joe’s back was stiff from working a long shift, so he stopped and gave it a good stretch. Flinging his arms wide, he managed to squeeze out a yawn while he was at it, although he wasn’t sleepy. As soon as his long frame was limber enough, he set off down the trail again, his step springy, his eager smile still in place because he knew Ned was waiting for him in the darkness up ahead.
Sweet, loyal Ned.
It was that final, happy thought of Ned waiting for him that brought the whistling tune to Joe’s lips. That and the other tune he could hear being butchered somewhere down among the night-shrouded trees. It was Ned, of course, and the tune he whistled was so thoroughly botched it might have been anything from “Turkey in the Straw” to a medley of Lady Gaga’s greatest hits.
Ned was a lot of things, but musical wasn’t one of them. And at that thought Joe suddenly laughed out loud.
He burst from the trees and spotted the footbridge up ahead—and the young man standing on it.
Oddly, at that moment, Joe’s heart hammered a little more quickly, a little more loudly. Never before had he questioned the fact that the sight of a mere friend should produce such a biological reaction. After all, Joe wasn’t used to having friends. This was a learning experience for him. And besides, Ned wasn’t just a friend. He was far more than that. Or soon would be if Joe had anything to say about it.
So when his heartbeat ratchetted up a notch, Joe didn’t think anything about it. Not much, anyway. He simply sprang from the shadowy trail into the moonlight and rushed up to Ned standing on the bridge. Ned jumped, of course. In fact he almost looked like he was having a heart attack. Then just as quickly, laughing, they fell into each other’s arms in a friendly hug. After a couple of beats found them still hugging, Joe began to feel a little awkward and reluctantly eased himself out of Ned’s arms.
“Hi,” Joe said. He could feel his smile creasing the skin around his eyes.
“Hi back,” Ned said, his own smile exposing every moonlit tooth in his head.
Joe stood a head taller than Ned. Still standing close, they turned toward the mesh and stared down at the cars zipping by below. When a big semi roared past, the wind of it blasted over them. Ned’s T-shirt billowed up around his stomach, exposing his belly button for a brief, wondrous moment that Joe captured with his startled eyes. He suspected he would drag that mental snapshot out later when he was alone in his apartment. And heaven knows what he would do with it then.
“How was work?” Ned asked in a quiet voice, and when he did, he turned to Joe with an eager light in his eyes. Joe’s breath caught because he really liked it when Ned’s soft gaze drifted his way. He liked it in the daytime, he liked it at night, he liked it always.
Joe thought Ned was the handsomest guy he’d ever seen, even with hair that always seemed to be in need of a cut. Ned kept it long, of course, because of the scar, and Joe understood that. Made perfect sense. And that thick mop of blond hair certainly didn’t detract from Ned’s looks. If anything, it multiplied it.
Ned’s eyes were a gentle, pale blue. Surrounded by long, light-colored lashes, those baby blue eyes could lock on and nail a person in place. Joe, at least. Ned had such a sparse growth of blond beard that he had once admitted to Joe he only shaved on Sundays. Sometimes, along about Saturday or so, Joe had noticed that if the sunlight caught Ned just right, a sort of a nimbus formed around Ned’s face where the light sifted through the baby hairs, almost like the halo that circled Jesus’s head in an illustrated Bible Joe once had foisted on him when he was a kid. An aura. An iridescence. At moments like that, Ned seemed to glow from within.
And when he did, it took most of Joe’s willpower not to reach out and stroke that lustrous shimmer of light from Ned’s downy cheek.
He and Ned did not talk about adult stuff. Sex. Love. Those were subjects they never touched upon with each other, and Joe had begun to wonder why. Other guys did. With some other guys, that was all they talked about. God knows the thoughts were there, at least in Joe’s head. And he thought maybe they were now and then in Ned’s head too. He saw the way Ned looked at him, how his gaze mellowed as if the very sight of Joe brought him contentment. How touches sometimes lingered. How tiny intakes of breath occurred at the unexpected stroke of a hand along an arm. The way Joe sometimes pushed Ned’s hair out of his eyes without asking, and the way they occasionally grew still at the exact same moment, as though the same intriguing thoughts had entered each other’s heads simultaneously, pulling them together.
Buried among all the other dawning emotions, Joe felt protective of Ned, and he was aware Ned looked up to him. No one had ever done that before. No one had ever needed Joe at all. No one but Ned. Somehow that made all the o
ther feelings even more profound.
Joe suspected the other tenants of the apartment building where they lived gossiped about them, since they were together so much, but he didn’t care. In fact, if the neighbors had read the thoughts that had been creeping into Joe’s head almost from the day he and Ned met, the gossip mill would have gone crazy.
Joe was torn from his musings by the scream of an airliner swooping low over the park, powering down and lining up for a landing at Lindburgh Field to dump its cargo of tourists. San Diego was a great tourist destination. There were strangers everywhere, every single day of the year, slathered in sunblock, toting cameras, gaping at the sights.
JOE COULD not know, of course, that the jetliner overhead was not dropping tourists bound for San Diego at all. It was, in fact, a Lufthansa Airbus A380 en route from East Meadow, NY, to Beijing, rerouted to San Diego due to atmospheric conditions, and carrying 514 passengers, each and every one of them as mad as a hornet that their schedules were being disrupted.
Nor would Joe have cared about the angry passengers, for his priorities, like his gaze, were focused elsewhere at the moment. They were focused on the man standing beside him.
“HOW WAS work?” Ned asked again.
“Work was good,” Joe said, shaking himself back to the present, shelving all his inner ponderings, as he always did when Ned was around. “We planted the miniature palms inside the gorilla enclosure I told you about. Remember?”
Ned nodded. “What did they do with the gorillas?”
Joe shrugged. “Shunted them into an adjacent enclosure. Not that they would have bothered us. We just didn’t want to scare them with all the bustle and noise.”
“I like gorillas.”
Joe grinned. “So do I.”
Joe’s grin softened to a lazy smile when Ned laid his hand on his shoulder and pointed to the sky. “Look,” Ned said. “Am I crazy, or is the moon sort of pink?”
Joe edged a little closer to Ned because he really liked the way Ned’s hand felt resting on his shoulder. He gazed upward to where Ned was pointing.
“I’ll be!” he exclaimed, staring at the moon through the surrounding mesh. “It is pink.”
“What does it mean?” Ned asked.
Joe shrugged, turning his eyes back to Ned. “Beats me. Smog, maybe? Some sort of mutant space crap in the atmosphere? Could be anything, I guess.”
Ned was still looking skyward. “It’s kind of pretty,” he said. As he spoke, his hand slid along the expanse of Joe’s broad shoulder blade, outlining the edge of it with his fingertips, almost as if doing so helped him think.
Joe studied Ned’s face for a moment before trailing his eyes back up to the moon. “You’re right,” he said. “It is pretty.” As soon as those three little words were out of his mouth, he reached up to his shoulder and stroked the back of Ned’s hand. Ned eased his hand away and stood there awkwardly, turning away from that weirdass pink moon to gaze up into Joe’s face. Such an astonishing expression of innocence lit his face that Joe all but gasped at how beautiful it was.
How beautiful Ned was.
So being braver tonight, and being on the verge of major epiphanies and damn well knowing it, Joe reached around Ned’s waist and pulled him close.
He felt Ned tense for a moment before he relaxed against Joe’s side. They stared down at the passing vehicles scooting by beneath their feet.
“I’m glad you met me,” Joe said, and when Ned let his head fall to Joe’s chest, Joe felt his heart speed up again. “It’s a long lonely walk on the nights you don’t come.”
“I like meeting you,” Ned said, his lips moving against the khaki shirt with The San Diego Zoo above the breast pocket and another patch above that reading simply Joe. Still standing close, Ned snaked an arm around Joe’s waist too. They stood there in the moonlight for the longest time, watching the traffic go by. Joe enjoyed the sensation of being close, holding on. He hoped Ned enjoyed it too.
When Joe tilted his head down and dug his chin into Ned’s hair, he felt a sudden hunger that made his dick shift inside his pants. He closed his eyes at the sensation.
After a few heartbeats of silence, Ned lifted his head to gaze into Joe’s eyes. “You tensed up,” he whispered softly.
“Backache,” Joe lied, wondering what Ned would think if he knew the real reason he’d tensed up. Sorry, kid. Couldn’t help myself. Had a boner.
Ned nodded as if he understood, which of course he didn’t, thank God. “You work too hard,” he said.
They stood silently arm in arm. As if the same thought struck Ned at the same time as Joe, they both tilted their heads up to gaze once more at the rose-tinted moon. In a lull of traffic below, which also cast them suddenly into darkness, the silence of the sleepy night flooded over them. The sweet scent of pine and honeysuckle tinged the air like some giant was out there with a big can of Glade, squirting it around.
Joe chuckled at that ridiculous thought and gave Ned a nudge with his elbow. “Walk me home,” he said, and Ned nodded shyly.
SIDE BY side, their arms bumping together now and then in a comfortable sort of way, they left the footbridge and entered the shaded uphill path leading into the trees.
With Ned at his side, Joe enjoyed the darkness and the shadows far more than he had when he was alone. Ned relaxed too, as if any night fears he might have felt before were now swept away in Joe’s presence.
Halfway home, at a rough spot in the trail, Joe took Ned’s hand, offering him support. Even when the trail leveled out again, he didn’t relinquish it.
Still holding hands, they talked quietly of inconsequential things.
“How was your work?” Joe asked. Ned worked in a deli, serving customers, building sandwiches, sliding endless chunks of meat through an electric slicer, then cleaning the slicer, over and over and over again.
“It was exciting,” Ned said. “Any day I leave work with all ten fingers still attached is exciting.”
The trail was so deeply hidden in shadow at this point that the only connection Joe felt to the world at all was the warmth of Ned’s hand in his and the crunch of pebbles beneath his feet. That and Ned’s sweet, mellow voice wafting through the darkness toward him.
“That’s good,” Joe said. “Wouldn’t want you losing any body parts.”
“No indeed,” Ned agreed. “I might need them someday.” Joe knew Ned was smiling because he could hear it in his voice. He really liked hearing a smile in Ned’s voice. But was that last comment about body parts Ned’s way of teasing Joe about the cloud of sexual energy that had been hovering around them for a couple of months now? Or was that sexual energy only in Joe’s imagination? Maybe Ned didn’t feel it at all. Maybe he was just kidding. Innocently. Heterosexually. Butchly.
And wouldn’t that be a fucking bummer.
Another airliner roared past overhead, swooping low toward the city skyline and the airport just beyond. They both looked up. “It’s long past midnight,” Joe said. “Usually incoming flights have stopped by now. I think it’s an ordinance or something that they can’t land after a certain hour.”
“Well, they’re landing now,” Ned said.
Joe nodded. “So they are.”
They resumed their walk. Joe thought about his job as groundskeeper at the San Diego Zoo. It was a job requiring night hours because the zoo honchos didn’t want maintenance people or landscapers with shovels and hoes and sweating like pigs distracting the paying customers. Theoretically, a trip to the zoo should be like a visit to Disneyland. You never saw anybody scrubbing toilets or planting begonias there either. It was all done at night.
The only thing Joe didn’t like about his job was that it cut into his time with Ned, who, naturally, worked days. Most of their time together was spent doing exactly what they were doing now. Walking home side by side after Ned met him on the trails after work. It was Joe’s favorite hour of the day.
He knew Ned had been having money problems, and he broached the subject now because sometimes Ned
let things slip past without noticing. “Did you pay your rent at the apartment?”
Ned’s fingers tightened around his. “Yes, Daddy, I did. You don’t have to ask me every month. I only forgot a couple of times.”
“I know, Ned. Sorry. I’m like an old hen. Pecking away all the time.”
What Joe didn’t say was that one of his greatest fears was that Ned would be evicted from the building. God knows where he would end up living then. And worse than that, God knows if they would even see each other again. That was a possibility Joe simply didn’t have the heart to face. Not now. Not ever.
“I like hens,” Ned said. There was a smile in his voice again. “They taste good with dumplings.”
“Asshole,” Joe said, grinning too.
“Yes, even assholes are yummy,” Ned said. “Or so I’ve heard. Of course, not with dumplings.”
“Eww, I guess not.”
A moment later they were both howling with laughter.
Still chuckling, Joe stopped and grabbed Ned, pulling him into an embrace. “One of these days your jokes are going to get you in trouble. Someone is liable to take you up on one of your little double entendres, and then what will you do?”
Ned gazed up at Joe with merry, teasing lines carved all over his face. His eyes were dancing in the moonlight. “Lie back and enjoy it?”
Joe stood there, his long arms wrapped around Ned, holding him close. It was either a wrestling hold or a romantic embrace. He wasn’t entirely sure which, and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know. Joe hated himself for always balking at stepping over the line with Ned. After all, there was nothing he wanted to do more. But did Ned want the same thing, or was Ned just being Ned? Funny, innocent, a little off-kilter.
And so beautiful standing there cradled in his arms.
What Joe did know was that he had never been more tempted to kiss the man. But once again, he didn’t. The risk was too great. If it wasn’t something Ned wanted, it would break Joe’s heart and probably ruin their friendship to boot.