Hobbled (5 page)

Danny struggled out of bed when he heard the roar of a truck engine. Then the headlights swept across the room in the opposite direction and he heard the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up.

Danny ignored his itching leg and clomped naked to the west window. Once there, he pushed the curtain aside with one hand while rubbing sleep from his eyes with the other. Stifling a yawn, he looked down into the driveway of the vacant house next door.

Danny couldn’t believe it. There was a moving van just pulling up to the side of the house. It was a rental van. One of the big ones. While Danny watched, the motor was shut off and the engine rumbled down to silence. The driver’s door squeaked open with a rattle and a bang and out stepped a young guy not much older than Danny.

And holy shit, he was cute! He had blondish-red hair with ear buds dangling from his ears and wires from the ear buds trailing down around his neck and disappearing into his shirt pocket where an iPod must be tucked. He was wearing sandals and shorts and a polo shirt with the long sleeves rolled up over his elbows. He was kind of a little guy but well put together. Danny wasn’t sure, but he thought he could hear the guy humming along to whatever the song was he was listening to on the iPod.

He had a bounce in his step that Danny found very, very attractive. And the guy was wearing glasses. Glasses with heavy black frames. On anyone else those glasses would have looked geeky. On this guy, they looked sexy as hell.

Danny fumbled around in the dark for his binoculars, damn near breaking his neck. He accidentally kicked a basketball, which went bouncing across the room making a racket and scaring the cat, who took off like a bat out of hell, thundering down the stairs. After a couple of minutes of blind searching, Danny finally found the binoculars under a bag of tortilla chips. He raced back to the window and once again squinted down at the driveway next door as he adjusted the binoculars to get a better look at the young cute guy who had shown up out of the blue.

The guy was gone. At least the truck was still there, so Danny knew he wasn’t nuts. Then Danny heard another door squeak, a house door this time, and a light switched on in what was probably the kitchen of the vacant house. Then the back porch light went on. Then another light farther inside the house. Then another. And pretty soon every light in the place was burning brightly. Danny had never seen the vacant house lit up before, and he had been looking down at it from this bedroom window ever since he arrived in town.

Danny supposed he would have to stop calling it the vacant house. Didn’t seem to be vacant any longer. No sirree. Danny had a new neighbor, and he was cuter than crap. Woo hoo!

Listening to his own thoughts, Danny just shook his head. God, he was pathetic. He really had to get laid. He really, really, really had to solve this virginity problem and come out as a proud gay man and
simply get laid.
His dad would be surprised he was gay, he supposed, and his mom would throw a conniption fit, of course, but sometimes a guy just has to do what a guy has to do, and Danny’s dick was screaming at him to
just get the job done already
.

Danny wondered if he could get the job done with the cute new guy next door, but even he had to admit the odds of that happening were pretty slim. First of all, the guy would have to find Danny attractive. And Danny would have to not make a fool of himself the first time they met. And then they’d probably have to get a friendship going, and Danny always had a problem with friendships, he was so damned shy and all. And then, of course, the guy would have to be willing to overlook the cast on Danny’s leg and the ankle monitor courtesy of the San Diego Police Department on the other leg. And then he’d have to overlook the fact that Danny was a criminal. And on top of all that, the guy would also have to be gay. Duh. Jeez, the longer Danny thought about it, the slimmer the odds became of getting it on with his new next-door neighbor at all. And wasn’t
that
a depressing realization.

Danny was pulled out of his reverie by the sound of barking. A dog poked his head through the truck window like maybe he had just woken up. It was a big dog. The dog had reddish-blond hair, just like the guy. It was a golden retriever. Beautiful. Also just like the guy.

The dog leapt through the open truck window and bounded through the back door of the house, which the guy had left open. Danny trailed his binoculars from one window to the next until he found one that seemed to look into a parlor, or a den, although it was hard to tell since there wasn’t any furniture in the house yet. There, Danny saw the guy down on his knees, giving the dog a hug. The dog was eating it up too. Tail wagging, tongue lolling, butt swinging back and forth.

Danny supposed his tail would be wagging, too, if the guy was down on his knees in front of
him
and petting and cuddling
him
like crazy.

Danny wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe he heard music all of a sudden. Like, you know, a love song. Playing somewhere in the back of his head. God, that guy was hot!

And while Danny was thinking about love songs and being petted and all, his dick, unencumbered by clothes, woke up and lifted its little head to see what was going on. As it looked around, the little head got bigger and bigger.

Not knowing what else to do, Danny took a firm grip on his cock with one hand, continued to watch the cute guy through the binoculars, which he held with his other hand, and before he knew it, his knees were shaking. Of course, once a guy has a hard-on and his dick’s in his hand and his knees start shaking, that’s about it. Danny suddenly found himself groaning and shooting a torrent of come across his bedroom window like a fire hose.

Lord, it hadn’t taken two minutes.

When his heart stopped hammering and his dick stopped squirting, he went to fetch the Windex.

Oy. What a pervert he truly was.

But at least the music stopped.

T
HE
next morning at the crack of dawn, Danny was up and about, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so to speak. He showered so long he began to prune, and afterward he styled his hair properly, with gel and blow-dryer, taking infinite care in placing each hair exactly where he wanted. Then he headbanged and tossed it around to add volume and messed it all up again. Perfect. He used cotton swabs on his ears, brushed his teeth until he foamed up like a rabid dog, gargled three times, and even flossed between his toes with the towel on the one foot that wasn’t entombed in concrete. On the other foot, where his toes barely stuck out beneath the cast, Danny swabbed those toes with a washcloth liberally splashed with alcohol. After that, he clipped his toenails and fingernails with the nail clippers. He even trimmed the hair inside his nose with a tiny pair of scissors his dad used for the same thing. Then he smeared an itty-bitty dab of zit cream on a spot on his neck that looked like it was thinking about blossoming into a full-fledged fucking pimple and topped it off with just a speck of concealer.

Nothing gay about that, he reassured himself. Every teenage boy in America had a bottle of concealer stashed away somewhere for moments like this. They might not admit it, but they do. Cover Girl wasn’t just for chicks. Uh-uh.

Danny applied deodorant to his armpits twice because he forgot he had already done it once, then he tugged on a sexy pair of gym shorts and a muscle shirt that (he hoped) showed off his pecs and biceps, what little there was of them, since he was so damned skinny. And lastly, because he flat-out refused to wrap his legs in pink trash bags on this all-important morning, he dressed up his one foot that was available for public viewing with the right half of his best pair of sneakers and a brand new ankle sock.

There wasn’t much Danny could do about the ankle monitor or the cast. They would just have to be taken at face value. Hopefully, his new neighbor wouldn’t be hypercritical in the matter of broken bones and/or electronic detention as it applied to the criminal justice system.

Danny decided to skip breakfast because he was so nervous he figured he would probably throw it back up if he ate anything. He studied his reflection for five full minutes in the bathroom mirror to make sure everything was copacetic, and even he had to admit, he looked pretty darned good. He prayed to God the guy next door would think so too.

As soon as the sun crested the rooftops across the street, Danny was positioned at the westernmost edge of his property, clippers in hand, trimming, yet again, the hedge he had just trimmed the day before. This time he trimmed it like a neurosurgeon removing scar tissue from a damaged, but still living, brain. Carefully. Very, very carefully. Leaf by leaf and stem by stem. Once in a while, he would step back and study what he had just done, like an artist examining his latest brushstrokes on canvas. Then Danny would trim a little more. Snip snip—snip.

Danny trimmed and retrimmed the hedge so many times he began to wonder if there would be a hedge left by the time the guy showed up.

Of course, what Danny was really doing was killing time, waiting for the gorgeous guy who just moved in next door to step outside his house to either walk the dog or start unloading his truck. Danny had the whole “accidental introduction” scenario down pat inside his head. In fact, his bravery in the matter pretty much astounded even him. He must be truly smitten to be so determined to meet this guy. Good grief, the truck had been driven into the driveway barely five hours earlier. Danny supposed this was what his father would call “thinking with the little head.”

And yep, he had to admit, that’s pretty much what it was. If he hadn’t been under house arrest and unable to leave the property, Danny would have probably baked the guy a cake and delivered it to his door like Beaver Cleaver’s mom working for the Welcome Wagon. Of course, Danny would have to learn how to bake first. And then he’d have to somehow trick himself into not eating the cake himself.

Still, there was no getting around it. Danny was determined to come out. Coming out required having sex. Gay sex. And if he had his druthers, he’d like to come out with the new guy next door as his first conquest. If Danny could shoot sperm all over the bedroom window just by looking at the man from thirty yards away, what might happen if they actually came into physical contact with each other?

God. Danny blushed and suffered a flurry of heart palpitations just thinking about it.

Something cold touched the back of his leg. The clippers flew out of his hand and he squealed like a toddler. Whirling around, he saw a golden retriever.
The g
olden retriever.

And behind the golden retriever, a guy.

The
guy.

He was holding Danny’s clippers in his hand and grinning. Danny wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe the dog was grinning, too.

“Caught these in midair,” the guy said. “We should start a circus act.”

Danny touched the back of his leg. “Was that…?”

The guy looked fondly down at his dog. “Yeah. That was Granger. His nose is cold, isn’t it? He likes saying hello like that. Does it to me in the bed every morning, pressing that coldass nose to some body part or other. I don’t usually squeal though. Nice touch, that.” And the guy grinned even wider. There might even have been a chuckle or two in there somewhere, trying to get out.

Danny was still imagining what it would be like to press a cold nose to a few of the guy’s body parts. Jesus, that was one lucky dog.

Up close and personal, the guy was even cuter than he was the night before. While Danny floundered around trying to think of something intelligent to say, Danny checked the guy out, all the while trying not to
look
like he was checking the guy out.

The young man’s hair was ginger in the morning light. Redder than how it had looked in the moonlight the night before. It was cut shorter than Danny’s, and it was curlier. Thick, lush, and sexy. Danny hadn’t even known he liked redheads until he saw this one. Boy, he sure liked redheads now.

The redhead’s face was a collection of clean, crisp lines. Sharp handsome nose, lightly sprinkled with freckles, neat jawline, firm little chin with the hint of a cleft in it, and finely delineated lips that seemed to smile an
awful
lot. There were two tiny commas at either side of his mouth. Dimples. And between the dimples was a beautiful array of small white teeth. At the moment, since the guy was grinning, those teeth were on brilliant display. Behind the heavy black glasses, which on this guy somehow managed to look chic instead of geeky, his eyes were cornflower blue. They were surrounded by long pale lashes that seemed to catch the light when the sun glinted across them just right. In the middle of the cornflower-blue irises, there were tiny streaks of gold. Like sunbursts.

The face, over all, was open, friendly, amused, and cuter than hell.

While the guy was shorter than Danny, he was better muscled. And since he was dressed almost exactly like Danny, in shorts and a muscle shirt, Danny had a bird’s-eye view of nicely constructed arms and legs, all four of the little devils sprinkled with a pelt of reddish-blond hair that almost took Danny’s breath away, he so wanted to run his fingers over it. Or his tongue.

There was just a hint of blond chest hair peeking out of the top of the guy’s muscle shirt, and Danny could see his nipples poking up against the fabric.

Casting his eyes a little lower, not that he thought he should, but because he didn’t know how to stop himself, he detected a promising bulge in the front of the guy’s running shorts. That gave Danny food for thought; don’t think it didn’t.

And looking ever
farther
south, Danny saw the young man was standing on Danny’s lawn barefoot. Even his feet were cute. Strong, pale, competent looking. They were wet from the dew and speckled green with freshly mown grass clippings.

With a start, Danny realized that the guy was on the same side of the hedge as Danny was. Danny had been hoping that on their first meeting, the hedge would hide some of the hardware strapped around his legs, at least long enough to let Danny explain it all first. He guessed that wasn’t going to happen now. Although, if the guy
had
spotted Danny’s cast and ankle monitor, it didn’t seem to bother him much.