Jesse moved to take the fabric away from me, but instead of grabbing the cloth, he wrapped his hand around mine. “I want to.” He stared me right in the eye. His eyes were blue. Really blue. “I do. But I keep finding stuff that’s in a lot worse shape than it looks, once you scratch the surface.”
I needed to look away from his blue, blue eyes, and found myself staring at his knuckles like I’d never seen a hand before.
He moved the fabric, and me, around the back of the donkey and blew another, smaller cloud of dust off the dead animal’s hide. “You’re lucky,” he said.
“I am?”
“Living where you do.”
I glanced at the Old Faris, New Faris diorama, with the invisible tornado cutting Main Street in half. “We are talking about Faris, aren’t we?”
“Try the middle of Iowa. There were less than four hundred kids in my whole high school. You know how many of ’em were gay? Two.”
“Probably more than two. Statistically, I mean.”
“Right.” He nodded, and his easy smile went hard. “Like that football player I dated who was such a homophobe he had to boff the whole cheerleading squad to compensate for a little reacharound. He doesn’t count. He was ‘straight.’”
“Oh.”
“Larry Newbauer, who everyone called ‘Larry the Fairy’—he was the other one, besides me. Couldn’t stand him.”
“’Cause he was ‘Larry the Fairy,’ or...?”
“’Cause he was into drama club, for Chrissakes. ’Cause he stuck his pinky out when he drank. ’Cause he talked like Truman Capote. I’m sure I sound like I was wracked with my own internalized homophobia—but believe you me, that’s not the case, not by a long shot. He just got on my very last nerve. Plain and simple.”
I flapped the sheet into place just before another dust devil could engulf my head.
“Larry didn’t like me much, either. He called me ‘Deliverance.’ Not to my face, of course.”
“Of course.” I peeked over the fabric’s hem. Jesse was swabbing out the donkey’s ear with the delicate, precise movements of a master craftsman. “Better than ‘Larry the Fairy.’”
His smile, the real one, hinted at the corners of his mouth. “Guess so.”
He swabbed each eyeball, then combed out the donkey’s eyelashes with the tiny paintbrush. “You’re right,” I ventured. “Compared with your hometown, Faris is a regular pride parade.”
“No way. You got the U of I right down the two-lane.”
“Okay, but Faris campus is one of the smallest in the state, and half the student body’s studying bio-ag. Maybe twenty guys to hook up with. Twenty-five, tops.” Yeah, twenty-five sounded about right. And I’d slept with all of them. “You could always move,” I said. And for a second I’d almost said “move here,” which would have made me sound like I was planning our wedding or something. Luckily I’d stopped myself before the last word crossed my lips.
Jesse didn’t seem to notice. Thank God. “Hold your breath,” he said—at least he warned me that time—and he gave the donkey’s mane a final fluff. When the blow drier was done roaring, he said, “We got fifty wooded acres. I tried leaving once, and within a month I was so homesick I broke my lease and headed back. The rest of the world’s a nice enough place to visit...but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
He smoothed the mane out of the donkey’s eye and gave the beast a pat on the rump. “That’s it for the first floor. I’m gonna spend the rest of the night on the bird wall. Feathers are a bitch and a half.”
I stepped back so he could roll up his gear. He adjusted the knot on his bandanna and slung his roll of tools over his shoulder while I watched and made no apologies about watching. I supposed I couldn’t really picture him running lines for the school musical with Larry the Fairy. Too butch.
He twisted the bandanna more firmly into place, hooked a strand of long hair out of his collar with his forefinger, and then froze when he noticed me looking. “What?”
I shrugged, and gave him a smile that he couldn’t possibly mistake for anything but flirting.
“Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that no one else in my high school was gay,” he said. “I woulda flunked out for sure if I had guys like you giving me looks like that.” He flashed a grin of his own—less sultry than I imagined mine was, but a heart-stopper nonetheless—and turned toward the staircase. “’Course, I’m a lot more focused now than I was five years ago. And I got a bird or two I need to see.”
8
I’D TRIED TO WAIT UP for Jesse. I had. Maybe, pre-George, I could have done it. But I was running on maybe four hours’ sleep and no matter how hard I tried to force my eyes open, to pinch my forearms or slap my knees, no matter how many times I washed my face with cold water or looked really hard into a bare 100-watt bulb, I still conked out by the time Jesse came back to my apartment.
Either that or I had another bout of lost time in which I did something I would really have preferred to remember. But judging that nothing felt spent or sticky, I was guessing the only place I’d wandered was the Land of Nod.
Jesse lay curled beside me, with his hair in a ponytail and his rump against my hip, wearing an old gray gym shirt and a pair of boxers. I glanced at the clock. Five thirty in the afternoon, nearly an hour until he had to go, if he wanted to start work right when the Center closed its doors to the public. I supposed I should let him sleep. But I didn’t really want to.
I stared at his face, his cheekbones and jaw. The light dusting of freckles high on his cheekbones. The thick, strong eyebrows that kept him from looking girly with his long hair. His mouth—the bow at the top of his lips had the most kissable curve.
Footfalls in the stairwell jerked me out of my contemplation of Jesse’s mouth, kissable or not. I checked to make sure I wasn’t tenting my pajama bottoms—because I wouldn’t have been surprised, given what I’d been thinking about, but thankfully I wasn’t—and I headed for the door before Alex could bang on it. His knock was as loud as his footfalls.
“Hey,” he said as I opened the door. “Why don’t you give me that—”
“Shh.” I stepped out onto the landing, and he backed up to give me room to clear the door and shut it behind me. “Jesse’s asleep. He’s been putting in doubles.”
Alex’s expression did a little “Huh? Oh!” flip, and he rubbed his jaw as if he felt a blush start to creep up on himself. “Hey, I didn’t realize...I’ll let you get back to...uh....”
“It’s fine. You’re not barging in on anything.” Yet. “Like I said, I’m just giving him a place to crash.”
Alex smirked. “And one of you’s been sleeping on the couch.”
“Well, no....”
“You need a rubber?”
“A stud like me?” I said, “I need a whole box.” And then he did blush, bright red. “It’s fine,” I told him, “I’ve got it covered.”
“Well...tomorrow’s the big day.” I almost thought Alex was predicting the precise moment I’d get lucky, but then I realized he meant the MAHPS guy. “I won’t see you between now and then. Hang your uniform on the hook in the stairwell and I’ll grab it.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t forget.”
“I said, okay.”
Alex looked at me strangely, that face that looked so much like mine, my “big brother” whose mother was my father’s sister, and said, “You like this guy?”
“It’s a little early to....” Damn. His eyes were so piercing I felt like they’d burned two smoking holes through my head. “Yeah. I think so.”
He nodded. “Good. It’s good you met someone.” He turned and jogged down the stairs before it got schmaltzy between us. But I think he might have been making an effort to not be quite as loud as usual.
I went back inside and checked on Jesse. Still gorgeous—and still asleep. I found my notepad and wrote, Put out uniform. The last thing before that I’d written? Kissed Jesse.
I DID BRIEFLY CONSIDER waking Jesse wearing nothing but a smile, but nake
dness reminded me of doctor visits and paper sheets now—instead of up all night, and damn, I slept with that other guy’s boyfriend.
A big tumbler of Mountain Dew seemed safer. “Room service too? Awesome.” Jesse sat up and chugged the pop.
I watched his Adam’s apple work as he swallowed, and I imagined running my tongue over the column of his throat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then smoothed back his hair. His ponytail was in place, mostly, but a few dark strands had slipped free to frame his face, and without his flannel shirt, bandanna and big jeans, he looked hot.
I crawled into bed with him, and before I could cozy up against him, he got out.
I said, “Did I do something wrong?”
“Nah, you’re good. It’s...I should probably get back to the Center.”
“Right this second? That clock’s five minutes fast.”
“I need more time than that to get the lay of the land.” He rolled out of the doorway and made his way toward the bathroom. I followed, and watched him pull a toothbrush out of his jean jacket pocket and help himself to my toothpaste.
“Let me get this straight. Aren’t you the guy who weaseled my phone number out of me, invited himself over and planted a kiss on me in the conservation lab?”
He gave me an “And?” look around his toothbrush.
“You got to thinking about George, didn’t you? It’s too freaky. I get it.”
He spat, rinsed, and smiled at me. His dimples made an adorable reappearance that left me weak-kneed and giddy. “You’re mad ’cause I didn’t put out.”
“No, I...I mean, I—”
“Just messing with you. Seriously, though, I gave it some thought, and I was kinda hoping we could, I dunno, maybe do regular stuff together first.”
“Regular stuff.”
“You know. Like whatever you did with the last guy you were with.”
Puke in his Jeep and give his ex a hand-job at the world’s most pretentious dinner party? Probably not that. “As in, go on a date?”
Jesse focused extra hard on rinsing out his toothbrush. “If that’s not cool—”
“Um, sure. We could do...something.” Color me cynical, but I didn’t exactly trust a “let’s take it slow” speech from another guy. I tried to check myself before I came off as desperate, ’cause when you’ve got a liability inside your head, the last thing you want to seem is desperate. I backed out of the bathroom, turned to the kitchen sink, and started rinsing out the plastic tumblers.
Jesse tied on his bandanna as he did one more circuit of the place to see if he’d forgotten one of his layers. “Don’t worry,” he told me on his way out the door. “I’m a real cheap date.”
I held on to the sink and let my breath out slowly. Was I mad because he didn’t put out? Not exactly. But I was pretty disappointed.
One kiss, one single kiss, and I’d fallen for him like a bag of bricks.
At six o’clock I told Alex’s wife...damn it all, I had to look in my note pad...Kathy. I told Kathy I had a headache, ’cause I wasn’t in the mood to endure any dinner table stares, and when I went into work that night, I skirted around the prairie dog diorama so I wouldn’t bother Jesse on my way to the break room to drop off my lunch. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I ran into Luke again in the hall outside the offices.
“Web—your cousin’s on board. Right?”
What? I took a look at my notepad. Alex working Thursday, tell Luke. I crossed it out. “Yeah, he’ll be here.”
“I knew I could count on you.”
Oh, really? And that’s why he wanted to let me go and replace me with some scab from a service so he wouldn’t have to pay my benefits.
“Tomorrow morning,” he checked his watch, and reflexively, I did too. It was just past eleven. “Mr. Trevino from MAHPS will be here when we open, and that’ll be it. Our big moment.”
I nodded and tried my best to look totally neutral, a blank slate where someone could project whatever reaction on me they’d been hoping for. I did that often enough, when I discovered myself in the middle of a conversation with no memory of how I got there. In Luke’s case, I just wanted to cover my ass. If he wasn’t going to question whether or not he’d shut down his computer the night before, I sure as hell wasn’t gonna give him any reason to suspect he hadn’t.
“You get off at 7 a.m.,” he asked me, “right? Be back with your cousin by nine-thirty, just in case Trevino’s early. That ought to give you time for a quick nap.”
“Sure.” How nice to know he was so “concerned” about my well-being. Or did he know about George? I’d been scrupulous about not mentioning it at work—as far as I knew, anyhow. I ducked around him and went into the break room, where I was pleased to see my lunch was not already in the fridge.
Luke was still in his office when I made my rounds. People of the Plains. Looking good, even the Kickapoo woman...although the case where the bison hide had once hung looked conspicuously bare. Rock River Beaver. Still creepy—but still lustrous. I skipped down to the first floor. Isaac Faris, crouched beside his newly-found lead, had definitely made out well from Jesse’s visit. He’d had a good spit-polish—but he still wore that unfocused gaze that sent shivers down my spine; I worried that was how I looked when George was in the driver’s seat.
Once I’d made my way through every other part of the building and there was no way I could possibly keep avoiding the second floor, I crept up the stairs and walked the perimeter. I was so focused on not running into Jesse that I nearly shit myself when I rounded the corner and found Bridget attempting to scrub the F off the Cave FArt sign.
“Can you believe this?” she said. “Of all the ridiculous...it’s been vandalized so many times we’ve worn a groove in the plaque.”
“Maybe Jesse can retouch it.”
She looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
“Jesse Ray Jones,” I said.
“Oh, the taxidermist’s boy. You’re right, I’m sure he’d be better at this than I am.” She knuckled her eye, and her mascara made a u-shaped ring beneath her lower lashes. I shifted uncomfortably and wondered if I was supposed to tell her. Bridget planted her hands on her hips, looked around at the petroglyphs, and sighed. “Pretty soon it’ll all be over.”
Was that what Luke had said? I checked my notepad.
Alex working Thursday, tell Luke
Kissed Jesse.
Put out uniform.
I never wrote down what Luke had said, but I did remember him telling me when I was supposed to be back. I jotted, 9:30—all over soon and tucked the pad back into my pocket.
Bridget bustled past me and made a beeline for Denizens of the Sky. “Mr. Jones? Mr. Jones—come here a moment.” Crap. I’d just managed to get another item tacked on to Jesse’s to-do list. I slunk off to the third floor to have another look at the People of the Plains.
After midnight, I was outside the abandoned food court scanning the Old Faris, New Faris diorama when my phone rang. JR Jones. I supposed I should answer it. “Hello?”
“Did you call in sick? I haven’t seen you all night.”
“No. I’m...here. Just trying to let you get your work done.”
“Boss lady’s gone.” An awkward silence, and then, “I was kinda hoping you’d try to distract me for a minute or two.”
My heart pounded at my chest, the way it had when I’d found my lunch already sitting in the spot where I’d been in the process of putting it. “Less than eight hours to touchdown. I can wait.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
Another stretch of silence where the sound of my own pulse hammered in my ears, and then he said, “Okay, that’s cool. But could you give me a hand in the petroglyph alcove?”
9
I WENT UPSTAIRS AND found Jesse inside the display, shining a small flashlight at the series of stylized figures. He said, “This tunnel actually goes somewhere.”
“It’s about three feet deep. Which is two and a half feet deeper
than any other tunnel in this place.”
“That painted rock is real, though, huh? Not some artist’s rendition.”
“Yeah. One of the miners found it and realized it had cave paintings on it before they blew it up looking for more lead.”
I glanced down at the Cave FArt sign. The F was missing. Jesse swung a leg over the ledge and tapped on the railing, inviting me to join him. I felt like the world’s biggest dumbass, all those things I’d said back at my apartment, but I came over and stood beside him.
“The drive between your place and mine is doable,” he said.
“You may not have noticed, but I don’t have a car.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” He situated himself so he was fully seated on the railing, clasped his hands between his knees and swung his feet. “And it’s no big thing. I’ve got my truck.”
My heart hammered harder. I crossed my arms over my chest.
“I still got your number,” he said. “We don’t have to figure anything out right this second.”
“Easy for you to say. I have no idea where to take a date in Faris that’ll convince him I’m a total stud.”
Jesse laughed. “Look. I gotta pick up my old man at the airport Friday morning. After that I can come back—if I haven’t worn out my welcome.”
I turned toward him and stepped between his knees, and now, with him sitting on the railing, his head was a couple inches higher than mine. I rested my hands on the rail on either side of his legs and leaned in. He was dusty, but I didn’t care. I wanted to bury my face in his hair and breathe him in. “Sorry I was such a freak today....”
“Dude, you totally weren’t.”
“No, I was. I accused you of getting cold feet because of the tumor when you tried to slow things down. It’s like George came along and now I think everything’s about him.”
“Hey.” He took me by the chin and made me look into his eyes. “Unless you happen to be talking about George, I don’t give him a second thought.”
It was another one of those “will it happen?” moments that I live for and yet I feel so wound up about that I hope one never happens again. Him staring, me staring, and damn it, he still had his hand on my face, and what was he waiting for? All he had to do was...he tipped my chin up, and my eyelids fluttered closed.
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