by Anna Martin
James forced himself to concentrate in his afternoon classes, even though he really wanted to put his chin in his hands and stare out of the window and think about Dylan. It was just a harmless crush, after all. Right? He was allowed to have a harmless crush on a slightly older guy who had pretty eyes and dark hair and was sort of gruff and rough around the edges.
That was allowed.
Anthony met James at his locker after the final bell and immediately started talking about the girl that James’s dad had assigned to work with him on a chemistry project, and Anthony was so grateful because he’d been, like, interested in her for ages now, and it was like James’s whole family had come together to make this perfect moment happen.
James hummed and uh-huh’d and nodded along, because Anthony didn’t really want James to listen; he just wanted something to talk at so he could work through his feelings. James was used to this. It wasn’t one of Anthony’s greatest qualities, but there was no stopping him once he got into a flow. It was best to let him keep talking until he got it all out.
The journey to the garage should have taken about ten minutes, but after-school traffic meant it took almost twenty. Anthony was still talking as he pulled in, and it was only when James started to unbuckle his seat belt that Anthony realized he needed to stop talking about the girl.
“I’ll, uh, finish telling you about her tomorrow,” Anthony said with a stupid grin.
“I’ll look forward to it!” James said brightly.
For a second, Anthony looked hurt, and then he punched James on the arm. “You’re welcome for the ride, asshole.”
“Love you too, asshole,” James called back as he got out of the car. Anthony gave him a middle finger salute as he pulled away, and James knew they would be okay.
He turned and walked over to the fishbowl office at the garage. It was a little scary; the whole place was open, with three cars lifted up so men could work on them from underneath. Because it was all men here, all grease and sweat and a bad radio and a calendar on the wall with naked women holding tires.
There was a gnarled man in the fishbowl office, smoking and snarling as he slapped at the keyboard of his computer.
“Uh, hello?”
“What?”
“I’m James. I’m here to collect my truck?”
The man didn’t look over. “Motherfucker. Dylan has it, out back.” He gestured vaguely, and James nodded his thanks, sure if he spoke aloud it wouldn’t be heard.
He wandered through the garage to the shaded area out back, which looked like half abandoned loading bay, half junkyard. Sure enough, his trusty, rusty truck was parked off to one side, with half a dozen other cars sprawled haphazardly around the space.
“Hello?” James tried again. Then he startled when Dylan came whizzing out from under a car, lying on his back on a skateboard.
“Hey,” he said, grinning and clutching a wrench in his dirty hands.
“Asshole,” James muttered.
He almost worried that people who didn’t know each other as he and Anthony did didn’t normally call each other asshole, but Dylan laughed. So it was probably okay.
“Your truck’s fixed,” Dylan said. “It was the cylinder head, like I thought.”
“What’s the damage?”
“I used it as a project, so just parts. Three hundred.”
“Oh,” James said, relieved. He kept savings put to one side for emergencies or the car, so he could afford that. “Okay. Thanks, I appreciate it.”
“No problem.” Dylan pushed to his feet, flexing under a dirty white T-shirt, biceps bulging. He wiped his hair back from his face with his forearm. It left a streak of dirt.
“Can you take my credit card?”
“Sure. Come on through to the office.”
“The office?” James echoed, following Dylan and trying not to look too closely at his ass. “I think there’s an ogre in there.”
Dylan laughed again. “That’s Chuck. He’s probably trying to order something on the system. He doesn’t know how to use a computer and thinks cursing at it will somehow make it work.”
James didn’t say anything else.
“Dylan,” Chuck said as soon as Dylan stepped into the office. He stubbed his cigarette out into a mug. “You go to college. You know how to work this piece of shit.”
Dylan nodded and shooed Chuck out of the creaky leather office chair. Like everything else around here, it was streaked with black grease.
“What do you need?” Dylan asked easily.
Chuck shoved a scrap of paper at him. “Can you order this?”
“Sure. I’ll get it put on the delivery for Thursday.”
“Fine.” Chuck stomped toward the door. Then he frowned. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Dylan said. He pressed his lips together, clearly suppressing a laugh until Chuck left. Then he blew out a long breath.
“Wow,” James said. “He’s a charmer.”
Dylan shook his head and smiled, already tapping at the keyboard to input the order. “He’s all right. Let me just get this done. I can’t process your payment until this has cleared.”
James nodded. He looked around the tiny office. There were competency certificates pinned to the wall, faded and almost illegible. The dates were from the late ’90s to early 2000s. Another almost-naked woman calendar, this one from 2007, hung on the wall, still with the Miss December beauty in a red Santa hat pouting at them.
Though there were what could generously be called visitor’s chairs lining one wall, they were all full with more junk—toolboxes, car parts, trade magazines, a huge roll of blue paper.
“Sorry about that,” Dylan said. He clicked something else, and the printer started to whirr. It was an honest-to-God, dot matrix printer, the type that took paper with perforated edges with little holes to guide the paper. The stack of off-white paper, concertinaed into a box, was tucked under the table.
“This place is like a Dr. Who episode,” James said. “I feel like a man out of time.”
“You get used to it,” Dylan said with a smile.
James dug his wallet out of his pocket while Dylan found his order and brought it up on the screen for James to check. The garage did, at least, have a working credit card machine.
“Thanks,” Dylan murmured and carefully filed the paperwork away. He grabbed James’s keys from the rack behind the desk and gestured for James to follow him.
“She’s all yours,” Dylan said, tossing James the keys as they walked across the back lot. “I changed the oil for you and checked all the levels while I was in there, and pumped your tires. So you should be good for a while.”
“Thanks,” James said sincerely. “I really appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
“I could maybe take her out for a drive,” James said, leaning against the truck. “See how she’s running.”
Dylan nodded seriously. “That’s probably a good idea.”
With his arms folded over his chest, Dylan’s biceps stretched the hem of his T-shirt. He was possibly the most gorgeous man James had ever seen in the flesh. So of course James turned into Captain Awkward.
“You could, uh, come with me? If you wanted?” His voice squeaked at the end of the second question.
Dylan’s face slowly melted into a tiny, tiny smile. “Sure. I can be done here in about ten minutes.”
“Okay. I’ll… wait here?”
Dylan nodded once and turned abruptly to go back into the office. James let out a loud huff, then forced himself to climb into the truck to wait.
“DID YOU go to Forest Heights High?” James asked as they navigated the winding country roads. “I don’t recognize you from school.”
“No,” Dylan said. He looked down at his lap. He’d changed from the grease-and-dirt-streaked T-shirt and jeans into dark blue jeans and a plain black T-shirt. Somehow, he still looked just as ridiculously sexy. “I went to George Washington for a while, but I never really did well in school. I dropped out, and Ste
ve homeschooled me until I got my GED, and then I started the automotive program at the community college.”
“Oh. And your dad was okay with that?”
“Steve’s good,” Dylan said. He had that small, quiet smile on his face again when James glanced over.
“Steve?”
“He adopted me when I was fourteen,” Dylan explained. “Which is, you know, really fucking unusual for a kid to get yanked out of the system and into a real family at that age.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” James said, realizing almost too late that this was incredibly personal territory.
Dylan shrugged. “I don’t mind. Unless you don’t want to hear about it.”
“I do! I do. Sorry. Go on.”
Dylan still hesitated before continuing. “I was in and out of foster care and group homes since I was four. Started running away when I was ten. By the time I was fourteen, I was hopping from one county to another to try and stop them from catching me. Steve… he’s not a normal guy,” he said with a laugh. “When he decided he was gonna adopt a kid, he walked into the agency and said he wanted to see the list of the most unadoptable kids they had. I was on that list.”
“That’s quite an achievement,” James said, aiming for levity and seemingly hitting it. Dylan chuckled.
“Yeah. I was a very violent kid. So angry at the world. One of my foster dads had knocked me about to try and get me to ‘man up’ and… I guess I just saw beating the shit out of people as a good solution to any problem. Steve is so calm. He never took any of my bullshit, but he let me be angry. He never told me I shouldn’t be seriously pissed off at what I’d been through.” Dylan shrugged again. “He’s a very peaceful influence.”
“Sounds like you love him a lot.”
“Yeah.”
“Dylan?”
“Hmm?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Oh thank God,” James said in a rush.
Dylan laughed, bright and easy. “Almost twenty-one. Why?”
“I was really nervous you were going to say older than that, and it would make everything really awkward.”
“You’re a senior?”
“Yeah. I’m eighteen.”
He turned onto the ridge road that would take them along the high cliffs overlooking the lake. At this time of the afternoon, the sky was starting to soften into evening, the sunset over the hills glowing and beautiful.
“So, are you an only child too?”
“Nope,” James said easily. “I have a twin sister. Frankie. We live with our dad.”
“Can I ask about your mom?”
“There’s no big story,” James said. “She never really wanted kids. She let my dad talk her into it. She left when me and Frankie were still babies.”
“Do you still see her?”
“Sometimes, when she comes back to town. She has friends here. I don’t think she likes the fact that we’re almost adults, though. It freaks her out to think she’s old enough to have kids in college. My dad’s a teacher.”
“At FHH?”
“Yeah,” James said with the dramatic sigh he used whenever he was asked that question.
“Wow. That has to be….”
“Awkward? Yeah. It’s not the best fun in the world, but”—he shrugged—“we deal with it.”
Dylan was quiet for a while as they drove along, seemingly happy to stare out the window at the hills. James was a-okay with that. Broody and interesting was Dylan’s thing; James wasn’t going to take it from him. Also it gave James the perfect opportunity to steal glances of Dylan’s stubbled, strong jaw and the frowny face that was so very intriguing.
Dylan caught him staring, and his face softened into the smallest of smiles.
“Do you like coffee?”
“Uh?” James grunted inarticulately.
“Coffee,” Dylan said, smiling a little more. “If you take this next turn, there’s a Starbucks not too far away.”
“I could do Starbucks,” James said, aiming for suave and probably sounding like an idiot. He took the turn and followed Dylan’s instructions to take them there.
Dylan ordered real coffee, and James got a strawberry Frap, because even though Frankie had gotten really into fancy coffee over the past winter, it made James feel jittery and anxious and nervous. So he didn’t bother.
Dylan paid for James’s drink before James had the chance to.
He waited until they were seated near the window to unload.
“Are we on a date?” he asked with a rush. Then he took great interest in his straw, too humiliated to look Dylan in the face.
It probably wasn’t a date, and Dylan wasn’t interested, and now James had made it supremely awkward again because he was a stupid dork who couldn’t keep his thoughts to himself—
“Possibly,” Dylan said, cutting off James’s silent mental self-berating.
“Uh,” James stuttered. “Oh.”
“I wasn’t sure if you thought of me as someone dateable,” Dylan said in a soft voice.
“Oh! I do!” James said in a rush. “I mean….”
It was too late. Cool was a hundred yards behind him and disappearing quickly.
Dylan chuckled under his breath and knocked his foot against James’s under the table.
“Then, yeah,” he said, “this could be a date.”
“I’m sorry.” James tried to ignore the familiar rush of embarrassment and failed. “I’m a dork.”
“I think you’re cute.”
“Ugh, that’s even worse,” James said, burying his face in his hands so the words came out muffled.
“You don’t want me to think you’re cute?”
“No, I want you to think I’m, like, sexy,” James said. “You know. Cool. Charming, maybe. Little kids are cute. Puppies are cute.”
“Cute boys can be cute too.”
That statement did not seem like the kind of thing Dylan would say. He looked far too surly to find anything cute. Especially not James.
“So,” Dylan said, filling the gap in conversation created by James’s self-loathing. “Do you have a sexual orientation that might find me cute too?”
He was teasing, James knew that, maybe flirting a little too. It took a lot of control for James not to implode.
“I, uh… to be honest, I haven’t quite figured it all out,” James said. He swirled his strawberry vanilla slush around in its plastic cup. “I definitely think you’re hot as balls,” he added quickly. “Just to make that clear. But I’m not really sure if I want to put a label on my sexuality yet. I’m going with ‘not straight’ for now.”
“Huh,” Dylan said. “That sounds like a good thing to me.”
“It does?”
“Yeah. Not everyone’s sexuality is a fixed thing.” He shrugged one shoulder elegantly. “It can change over time. You shouldn’t feel pressure to put a label on it until you’re ready.”
“Oh,” James said.
“And I appreciate the ‘hot as balls’ comment.”
“Oh, Jesus. I swear, my brain-to-mouth filter is totally defective. Words come out of my mouth, and I have no idea where they came from.”
“You shouldn’t worry about it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s part of your charm.”
“Hah!” James said triumphantly. “You think I’m charming.”
Dylan laughed then, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “You got me. I confess.” He finished his coffee and set it on the table. “You want to take that to go? It’s getting late.”
James nodded. “Sure. I can drop you wherever you need to be.”
“I live about fifteen minutes away.” He dropped his voice to a hushed almost-whisper. “I take the long route to work every day so I can get breakfast from here.”
James winked. “I can keep your secret.”
“Come on,” Dylan said, amused, grabbing James’s hand to pull him up from his chair. He didn’t drop it as
they walked back to the truck. In fact, he shifted the position of their hands so it was more comfortable, and James tried not to think too much about the fact he was walking through a parking lot holding another guy’s hand.
It didn’t take too long to drive to Dylan’s place, though they hit some of the rush-hour traffic at the edge of town. James didn’t mind. His mind was whirring, trying to figure out how to ask for a second date, then being annoyed at himself that he was spending more time thinking about a theoretical next date and not enjoying the one he was on right now.
“This is me,” Dylan said, pointing to a nice, modest house halfway down the street. It was a neighborhood James didn’t really know. Most of his friends were people he’d known his whole life, and he’d only started to think there was a problem with that in the past few days. Forest Heights wasn’t a small community, but James had been quite happy keeping himself isolated in his little corner of it. He’d probably been missing out for years. He could have met Dylan a long time ago.
James parked out front, careful to leave the drive clear.
“Are you going to be okay getting to work tomorrow? You left your car there.”
“Yeah, it’s fine. Steve’s used to me working on it when I’m not busy. He takes me in a few times a month at least.”
James nodded. A pregnant pause filled the cab of the truck.
“Are you free—”
“Do you want to—”
“You go first,” Dylan said, his eyes shining with amusement.
“No, you.”
“Okay. Would you like to go catch a movie with me on Sunday?”
James made a face. “I’m working. At the movie theater. I’m free on Saturday, though.”
Dylan made a face back at him. “Steve has tickets to go watch a ball game.”
That awkward silence settled between them again.
“I want to take you on another date,” Dylan said decisively.
“Okay. That sounds good to me.”
“How about we keep texting each other until we figure out when we’re both free?”
James nodded emphatically. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Dylan said. He bit his lower lip and glanced over at James. “Can I kiss you?”
“Still very yes.”
Dylan pressed his fingertips to James’s cheek, holding it gently in place while he brought their mouths together. It was a soft kiss, no tongue, but holding plenty of promise. The angle was a little awkward, and James thought if they were going to do this for any length of time he’d probably get a crick in his neck.