Crooked Words

by K A Cook

rather than deep, meant for whispering oh-so-fucking-bad things in bed—it gave him no clues as to who she was, but it made him shiver.

  He wasn’t crushing on a girl, was he? A girl so masculine in all the hot, suave, well-suited ways that meant Ben was just as turned on?

  What if he was?

  “Here.” Lisa patted the chair beside her—and, to her credit, only blinked when the girl grabbed the chair closest to Ben, sitting sideways so that she could prop her feet on the rails of Ben’s chair. Her black leather boots—featuring polished silver buckles and dangling chains like something displayed in the windows of a counter-culture fashion shop, all the more incongruous when worn with a pinstriped suit—brushed against his shoes. “Uh … hi. I’m Lisa.”

  “Chris,” she said, and she leant forwards and plucked Ben’s glass from the table, grinned right before taking a sip. Ben blinked in shock, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight of her running her tongue over her lips and placing the glass back down on its coaster. “You see, I have this problem. T-thought I’d buy you a drink, but I had no idea what you drank.” Chris raised both eyes, and there was nothing particularly feminine in the way she (he?) stared right at Ben, far more like a sassy drag queen than a packing girl— maybe just a drag queen slumming it for the nine-to-five, with not enough time to change between leaving work and hitting the bar?

  The name meant nothing; it could have been short for anything.

  “So…” Chris’s stare lingered for a few seconds too long before Ben realised what he wanted. Lisa rolled her eyes and poked Ben in the knee before he found the ability to speak.

  “Ben. It’s Ben.”

  “So. B-ben. Can I buy you a drink, if you tell me what it is I just drank, because I still don’t know?” He leaned over, close enough for his breath to tickle Ben’s ear. His lips quirked upwards in that adorable unselfconscious grin, and Ben couldn’t look away. “It would have been so sexy if I could have figured it out from taste alone, but—well.” He shrugged, still grinning. “Now you know my gravest personality flaw, so ... so that gives you the chance to run, right?”

  The noise that came out of Ben’s mouth sounded as much like a giggle than it did a snort or snicker, but Chris didn’t falter.

  “I thought we could go and take our drinks outside,” he said, “and walk along the beach, learn more about each other than the fact we both enjoy a good suit?” His free hand found Ben’s knee, rested lightly enough to hint at a squeeze but with the safety of plausible deniability if Ben flinched or pulled away. He didn’t. “You have the most gorgeous eyes. Remind me of a glob of blue paint.”

  He didn’t mean to laugh, but the snort escaped Ben’s lips anyway, helped along by that purple-blue wink. “Paint?”

  “I could have said Smarties or shaving gel.” Chris knocked back the rest of Ben’s glass and set it down on the table, tapping his fingers—long, slender, decorated with pale pink nail polish and different coloured smiley-faces on each nail—against the lacquered surface. “Or those blue enviro bags.”

  Lisa rolled her eyes as if unimpressed by the novelty, but Ben couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of such a statement. In the past he’d had guys, buzzed on a few glasses of their favourite poison, tell him all sorts of sincere-sounding compliments that got all the more elaborate the closer they got to drunk. Ben thought he was all right, for what he was; someone telling him just how sexy his eyes or arse were, however, tended to set him on edge. It was a pretty good sign someone was going to try and talk him into going back to his place and getting laid, and Ben was getting tired of being the guy that got picked up at bars and crept out the next morning, destined to have all future messages blocked and ignored by someone who just wasn’t in it for a relationship. This, though. Ben didn’t know if Chris meant it or was just being a smart-arse, but it didn’t matter either way.

  Ben grinned and tilted his head just enough to catch Chris’s gaze. “I thought more like mouthwash, myself. Ocean blue is so passé, yeah?”

  Chris stared back, his lips lush and pouty as if they were just begging to be kissed. Ben had never seen lips like that on a man, but he found himself itching to run his fingertips over Chris’s chin, wondering if he’d find the betraying rasp of stubble. What would it mean if he didn’t?

  “C’mon, man. These days, you rock up to a hot guy or girl, mention something about how their eyes are like the ocean and their hair’s the colour of a pasture in drought, and they all start to back away slowly for some reason.” Chris quirked one eyebrow and Ben choked out another giggle-sounding sound—but this time he was too amused to care.

  Lisa sighed and rolled her eyes, possibly on the brink of muttering something about embarrassing men under her breath, and began staring out towards the bar on the hunt for a new daydream. Ben thought he should say something to include her, as was the job of a best friend, but he couldn’t look away from Chris’s face.

  “I have been in that situation, yes.”

  “Then you understand. The old metaphors don’t seem to do it in this cutthroat dating world.” Chris hesitated, still tapping away with his fingers. “I think your hair looks like a, a Mars Bar.”

  A Mars Bar? Ben hadn’t thought of that when the hairdresser talked him into the golden brown highlights, but he smiled and leaned in closer to Chris. “Damn, and here I was trying to look like a Flake.” He angled his head, now so close to Chris’s eyes that he could almost see his own reflection. Brownish-green, nothing spectacular—since when were eyes ever what fiction made them out to be, anyway?—save for the sheer gumption that let Chris walk into a bar with them framed by pop-singer-esque glitter, the shadow trailing down one cheek in a vibrant smear of colour. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any suggestions for getting away from the Mars Bar look?”

  Why was Ben flirting back? He didn’t even know what Chris was … except for being gorgeous and crazy in all the right ways, except for being the person everyone in the bar stared at, except for being just about everything Ben had ever wanted in anybody on first glance. If that sass and smile came hand in hand with those fingernails and a voice that defied Ben’s ability to put a label to it, was it really a drawback when it was something Ben only assumed he didn’t want? Did it matter what lay underneath the suit?

  He expected other people to accept him; shouldn’t that acceptance go both ways?

  “Last time I tried to dye someone’s hair, they only turned green for a month,” Chris said, beaming. “You want to live on the wild side, Ben?”

  Chris’s hair looked like a Picnic bar, uneven and spiky, just waiting for someone to run his hands through and smooth it out. Too long for a guy? Maybe. Too short for a girl? Possibly. These days, who could tell? Hadn’t Ben seen all manner of hair lengths and styles on all sorts of people?

  He couldn’t look away from Chris’s eyes, but this time Ben was lost for words. He knew Chris wasn’t talking about hair.

  He took a deep breath, raised one hand and cupped it around Chris’s chin; Chris sat still and let him, only clasping a hand in a tighter squeeze around Ben’s knee. The skin on Chris’s face was soft and smooth, which meant nothing at all, really. Chris might shave more than once a day. Ben had no way of telling, and the only way of finding out meant unforgivable rudeness—something that went far beyond asking someone what their gender was, but implied that it was of far less importance than their body. Shouldn’t Ben know better than that? Given it involved a suit-clad soul wearing smiley-face nailpolish, what chance was there that Chris’s answer would be simple? There might not even be an answer at all. If Chris didn’t look male or female, chances were that Chris damn well didn’t want to, and how did that not take courage—the kind of balls so few people, man and woman and person alike, ever had? How many times did Chris get harassed on the street for daring to dress in a way that didn’t follow the rules? “Was this your own hair?”

  A relieved smile flooded Chris’s face. “Guilty. I had … I had to go out and buy a green fake moustache
to match!”

  Ben swallowed back guilt of his own. What kind of anxiety did Chris hide underneath a projection of suave confidence and a killer suit? How many times had ze been rejected as soon as someone got close enough to realise hir presentation was a confusing, glorious mix of tells?

  “I think you’d look better in purple,” Ben said, grinning. “It’d totally match your eyes.”

  Chris shook hir head and increased the pressure of hir hand just enough that there were no longer any excuses. “Thought I’d look too much like a Violet Crumble bar.”

  “Violet Crumble bars taste good,” Ben said, raising one eyebrow, smiling just enough to leave the words as bent as all hell. “Matter of fact, I could probably go for one, now that you mention it. I don’t suppose you know where I could buy one?”

  Chris leaned forwards just a little, close enough to kiss if Ben tilted his chin. Ben reached out and wrapped one hand over the top of Chris’s wrist, just breathing in the vanilla scent before slowly moving inwards for the kiss, wondering what those soft lips were going to feel like. Instead, he started in surprise as Chris reached down, took Ben’s other hand, and raised it to hir lips like an old-fashioned gentleman. Ben didn’t know whether to punch hir and pull hir into a proper kiss …