by Barbara Bell
“What do you do?”
Mick shrugged and tucked his ID back into his pocket. “People phone when their computers stop working, and I try to fix them.”
“So . . . you’re the IT guy?”
“Yeah. I suppose I am.”
“Don’t you need to go to university to do that?”
“I did.”
“You . . .?” Joey’s brain backfired. “Wait. Time out. How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Twe— What?” Joey stared. Mick was older than him. By years. “Holy shit. This whole time I’ve been thinking you were this cute dorky uni student.”
Mick’s smile was back. Small and shy. “Yeah. Not quite.”
“How the hell do you make it to twenty-five without buying lube?”
Mick laughed nervously. As if Oxford Street hadn’t heard it all before. “Yeah . . . I’m a late bloomer with all this stuff.”
“What? Sex?”
“Um. Yes and no? I mean, I’m not a virgin or anything. I met my partner when I was sixteen, and he and I did stuff. But we only did certain things, and there is also a lot of stuff I missed. I only moved to Sydney a couple of months ago, and since I’ve been here, I’ve realised how much I still have to figure out, especially when it comes to . . . gay stuff.” Shyly. “Better late than never, right?”
“Oh.” Joey nodded. “For sure. And, hey, look on the bright side. If it’s gayness you want, you came just in time.” He waved at the Mardi Gras decorations lining the street. “Ever been to a pride parade before?”
Mick laughed and gazed at the rainbow banners, eyes sparkling in the darkness. “No. It should be . . . interesting.”
“Interesting. Yeah.” More like mostly naked people getting way too drunk and puking on you, but hey, he’d let Mick discover that part of gay culture for himself. And maybe he was into it. Becca had never had anything but fun at Mardi Gras. Maybe Mick would be as lucky. “So, you didn’t grow up in Sydney?”
“No,” Mick said. “I’m from a country town. Kooma land.”
“Kooma?”
Mick’s smile turned shy for a second. “I’m Aboriginal. That’s my tribe.”
“Oh. So the town you grew up in was, like, mostly Aboriginal, then?” God, he sounded like such a white guy.
If Mick wanted to cringe, he did a good job hiding it. “Pretty mixed, actually. And small. It’s only got about four hundred people.”
“Four . . . Shit. Really?”
Mick huffed out a laugh. “Yeah. I moved out when I was eighteen. Went to university in Coffs Harbour. Lived there for a while. Now I’m here.”
“And your partner?” Joey hated himself for even asking.
“He’s in Coffs Harbour.”
“Long distance,” Joey said. “That must be hard.”
“Hm,” Mick hummed. For a while they walked in silence. Joey was almost convinced that was the end of the conversation, when Mick turned to him suddenly, eyes pitch-black in the street lights. “What about you? Did you grow up around here?”
Joey snorted. “No. Not this part of Sydney, anyway. I’m from the northern suburbs. It’s about an hour on the train.”
Mick tilted his head. “It’s fancy up there, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess.” If by fancy he meant square hedges, swimming pools, and old white people with German cars. “It’s okay. Pretty boring. I don’t go back there much anymore.”
Mick tilted his head. “Not even to see your family?”
“Oh. Um. Sure. That . . .” never happens. Homosexual son. Homophobic parents. We don’t exactly have much to talk about. He didn’t say that though. There were certain things he didn’t say to strangers, even ones as cute as Mick. “We don’t talk as much as we probably should. They’re really busy running their businesses, and I . . . well . . . My life is here now.”
“I don’t think I could go for long without talking to my mum,” Mick admitted. “We’re close. I call her once a week. Pretty stupid, huh?”
Sounds awesome to me.
It had been years since Joey had come out to his parents, years since they sat him down at the dinner table and told him he needed to “straighten up” or leave, years since he had defied all expectation and actually walked out with his clothes stuffed into shopping bags. In all those years, nothing much had changed. He got “Happy birthday” emails once a year and was told when someone in his extended family got married or had a baby. But, other than that, they didn’t speak.
“Do you have any siblings?” Mick asked when it became clear Joey had abandoned the conversational ball on his side of the court.
“No. Just me.”
“Lucky. I have three brothers. All older.”
“Oh.” Joey thought about that for a second. “Wow.”
Mick smiled ruefully. “Yeah. We were always at each other’s throats growing up. I don’t know how my mum did it. They’re okay though. My oldest two brothers have kids now, so that’s pretty cool.”
Joey wasn’t sure what he could add to the conversation. He wasn’t sure he liked talking about families either.
Mick seemed to take something from his silence. Perhaps not understanding, but just an unspoken wish to move the conversation along. “Do you like what you do?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. I get to see all the sex toys as they come out. What’s not to love about that? Plus it’s taught me how not to be such a shit when it comes to everyone else and sex. Like, I used to be grossed out a little by lesbians. Hypocritical, I know, but I was. Now my best friend is a lesbian, so I guess it cured me of that. I mean, I see all sorts of people as part of the job—straight, gay, old, young—and they all just want the same thing. Better sex. More intimacy. Orgasms. It’s humanising, you know. We’re not that different at all.”
“Wow.” Mick blinked up at him. “That was . . . surprisingly deep.”
Joey grinned. “You don’t get that fixing computers?”
“No. Mostly I just want to yell at people for being stupid.” Mick stopped walking.
Joey paused, confused until he realised they had reached a fork in the road.
“I parked down here.” Mick nodded down the side street.
Wait a sec. Parked? In the city? Wow, he really was a grown-up. Who else had the money to do that? Joey didn’t even have a car.
“I’m going to the train station,” Joey told him.
“That’s farther down isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well I guess I’ll . . .”
“See you,” Joey finished for him and flashed a smile. “You need any more dildos, you come to me, okay? No shopping online. No going to the other sex stores.”
Mick choked out a laugh and nodded. “Just yours.”
“Good. I’ll see you, then. And have fun at Mardi Gras.” He waved and walked away. See, he told himself, you can totally be normal around him despite his too-big-for-a-twenty-five-year-old eyes and porn star mouth. And that was the objective wasn’t it? To seem normal, like Greg the foot fetishist. It was only creepy if Mick knew Joey was perving on him. Perving on him despite his partner.
But, even so, Joey couldn’t help but look over his shoulder as he moved down the street. Mick was standing where he’d left him, hands in his pockets, and gaze trailing Joey as he walked away.
“Joey!”
He jumped, almost throwing the box of butt plugs he was carrying across the floor. “Jesus. You don’t have to yell at me. What is it?”
Becca didn’t look impressed. “First, I did have to yell at you. I said your name four times and you didn’t answer. What’s with you? You’ve been away with the fairies all day.”
“I’m fi—”
“And second, you need to tell Kate that her beer is bad.”
He frowned and knelt by the butt-plug shelf. This was going to be tricky. They’d sold a lot over the last couple of days, but there were still enough on the shelves that he would have to do some moving around to make the new ones fit. “Why?”
“You haven’t tried yours yet?”
“No.”
“It’s bad. Really bad. Like, it was a miracle I survived.”
He took the first few plugs from the box and started filling up any free space he could find on the shelf. “I’m sure it’s not—”
“It. Was. A. Miracle.” She accompanied each word with jab from her finger. “Listen, Joey. You need to tell her before she kills someone. It’s literally a matter of life and death.”
He eyed her dubiously. “Why don’t you tell her? You’re the one that drank it.”
“Yes, well . . . I might have already told her I loved it . . . while drinking it.”
He digested this information. “So, you lied.”
“Yes.”
“To our boss.”
“Yes, but not about work. Just about her deadly beer.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I was over at her house and—”
Joey turned away from the shelf to look at her. “You were at her house?”
“Yes.”
“You were at Kate’s house?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You hang out at Kate’s house now?”
“Sure do.”
Okay. He was going to have to come out and say it. “Are you having sex with our boss?”
“No way!” Becca cried. “I would never. That’s crazy. Utterly insane. Never going to happen.” A pause. “We might have made out a little.”
Now it was his turn to speak in one-word sentences. “Oh. My. God.”
“Joey.”
“She’s thirty.”
“Thirty-three. And what’s wrong with that?”
“She has a baby.”
“Anabel. Have you ever met her? She’s so adorable.”
“She pays you.”
“Hey, hypocrite. Didn’t you have a sugar daddy once?”
“That was a joke. He paid me in sausage rolls. This right here? This isn’t a joke. She’s your boss. Your actual boss. Our actual boss. And,” he waved a hand in the air which, okay, that was a bit over the top, but hey, he was angry, he was allowed his stereotypes, “excuse me? ‘Hypocrite’? You’re the one that’s been giving me a hard time for ‘flirting in the workplace.’ Now I find out you’re getting down and dirty with the boss? Are you sure you want to pull the hypocrite card right now?”
“Look, okay.” Becca held up her hands. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but yeah, she invited me over for dinner, and things got a little frisky. I swallowed enough of her ale to get drunk, and we kissed and—”
“This is going to get TMI really soon isn’t it?”
“That’s exactly why I can’t tell her about the beer,” Becca insisted. “I might have a shot here, but not if I rip down her new hobby. You need to be the one.”
“No. No way. I’m not getting involved in this. When this all explodes and you lose your job, I’m just going to say I knew nothing.”
“Oh, come on.” Becca put on her best pout. “Do this one thing for me. This one thing.”
“Kate is terrifying,” Joey said. “And she makes us scrub the floor on our hands and knees. Is that what you’re into? Because if it is, then I have some great floggers I might be able to sell you.”
“Joey, please I—” A footstep. Soft but undeniably there. Becca craned her neck to see around the shelves, and for one chilling moment, Joey thought it might be Kate, that she had heard everything they’d said, but when he turned his head to follow her gaze, he saw Mick hanging back by the door.
And just like that, any anger he’d been feeling vanished, to be replaced with a tight thread of jittery nerves.
“Hey, hey,” he called out, keeping his voice as easy and friendly as he could manage. “How’s my favourite customer? Sorry again for closing on you the other night.”
“It’s fine,” Mick said and approached. Meanwhile, Becca turned the act of stepping quietly into the other room into a three-stage performance piece worthy of an Oscar nomination; frowning while she pretended to look for something, gasping in horror as she realised it wasn’t there, and all but clutching her chest as she swanned into the back room in search of it.
“Is she all right?” Mick said once the back room’s door was closed.
“That is a question I have asked myself a lot over the years,” Joey said, and shoved three more butt plugs onto the shelf before turning his undivided attention to the man standing over him. “So, what’s up? I can get you a great deal on some of these butt plugs if you’re keen. Only forty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents.”
“Eh, no thanks.” Mick hesitated for a moment before sitting down on the carpet with him. “I was actually coming for something else.”
“Oh? Let me guess. You ran out of lube with all the crazy video-chat sex you and your partner have been having now that you’ve come to Sydney.”
Mick didn’t look at him. “Not quite.”
“No? Condoms, then. Can never have too many of those.”
“No.”
Joey lowered his voice. “Please tell me it’s another dildo.”
“Not this time. It’s a . . .” Mick shifted nervously. “Well, it’s . . . The thing is it’s . . .”
“Do you need to write it down?”
“No. I . . . I just wanted to ask . . . Last night when we were talking . . .” Mick visibly gathered himself. When he spoke, the words came hard and fast. “Are we friends?”
A pause. “Um.” Joey shifted. “Sure. I guess.”
“I know we don’t know each other that much,” Mick said. “And I know we’ve only spoken a couple of times and most of the time you’ve been selling me stuff. And I know this probably sounds super weird but . . .”
But? But what? Joey held his breath and waited for the rest of that sentence.
It never came.
Mick sighed, his shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry. This was a stupid idea.”
“Hey. No. It’s okay.”
Mick huffed out a laugh. “It is stupid. You know it is. You’re just saying that to be nice. You’re so nice. Even when you don’t have to be.”
Joey struggled to think of a response to that. Fortunately, Mick didn’t seem to expect one.
“What I meant to ask you when I walked in here was, do you want to go to the parade with me?”
“The parade?” Joey echoed.
“Yes. The Mardi Gras Parade.” Mick’s eyes locked on to his, hopeful. “Do you want to go? I mean, we were talking about it last night, and I wanted to ask, but then we parted ways and I never got the chance. I’m still pretty new in town, haven’t made a lot of friends, and would like to see it but would rather not go alone.”
It took a while for Joey’s brain to catch up with what Mick was saying. “You’re inviting me to Mardi Gras?”
“Yes.”
“The Mardi Gras? The one that goes for hours and involves people covered in glitter marching down the street? That Mardi Gras?”
“Yes.”
Okay. This was unexpected. And, really, on the scale of how much unexpected things he could take, he thought he’d hit his peak with Becca and the boss but . . . nope. Now the cute guy who he’d talked to exactly three times had just asked him on a date.
Except it wasn’t a date. Mick had a partner. What he wanted wasn’t a date. It was a friend. That was why he’d asked him if they were friends. Could Joey be Mick’s friend?
“Yeah.” He answered his own question before he had time to contemplate it. “Sure. Sounds cool.” Showing a customer around town. That wasn’t inappropriate was it? No more than sleeping with the boss. As long as Becca was kissing Kate, he had that get-out-of-jail-free card. Might as well use it. “I’ll go with you.”
“Really?” Mick sat up straighter. “It won’t be weird?”
“Oh, it’ll be weird all right. Mardi Gras is meant to be weird. But don’t worry, I’ll show you around. Anything for my most regular customer.”
Mick’s smile, which
had bloomed, fell away for a moment and then returned again, smaller and more careful but still happy. “Thanks. I know me walking in like this just to ask you is strange. But it was nice talking to you last night, even if it was only for a minute. I figure it would be good to go with someone I can talk to.”
“Yes.” Joey put on a sage-like voice. “Talking. Always helpful when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Though, I did date this Irish guy once—couldn’t understand a word he said—didn’t matter. The accent was sexy enough. We were together for two whole days.”
Mick lifted an eyebrow. “Another ex?”
Joey laughed. “Yeah, but you probably don’t want to hear about that. Let’s talk about something else. Something fun. Something like the fact that we’re going to Mardi Gras!” He threw his hands up. “Yay! Pride parade! We’re going to see drag queens and drag kings and drag . . . eh . . . is there another type of drag? A drag prince? A drag knight? A drag court jester?”
Mick smirked.
“Okay. Never mind. I guess we’ll find out. Wow. It’s going to be crazy. I haven’t been in a few years, so this is good. You’ve given me an excuse to go. Is that bad? That I need an excuse to go to pride in my own city?”
“Maybe a little,” Mick said, voice wry.
Joey opened his mouth to retort, then consciously closed it. He was blabbering. Damn it. He’d been doing so well this time around. He’d been cool and collected. Not staring into Mick’s eyes. Except now he was staring into his eyes. And those eyes were staring back with the same intentness he remembered from their first meeting.
Joey looked away. “Eh. Cool. We can meet at the train station before the parade, unless you want to drive. It could be tricky finding a parking space though.”
“Train station is fine.”
“Good. Um . . .” Joey fished for something to say. “Is that all? I mean, that’s awesome but . . . is there anything I can get you?”
“You want me to buy something?”
He slung on a lopsided smile. “It would help with my sales record if you did.”