Hobbled (8 page)

“So are you getting all your work done?” Danny asked. “You must be, if you think you can get back early.”

“I am,” his dad said. Danny thought he sounded a little nervous all of a sudden. A little hesitant. “And Danny, I want us to sit down and have a talk when I get back. We need to get some things out in the open between us.”

Danny’s voice shot up an octave, and he clutched the phone tighter to his ear. He jerked himself upright so quickly in the kitchen chair he was sitting on that his cast hit the floor with a thud, jarring his broken leg. “Ouch!” he said. “I
told
you I’d be good, Pop. I won’t be getting into any more trouble, I swear. I don’t want you to send me back to Mom’s. I’m never going back there. I want to stay with—”

“Hush, Danny. Hush.” His father cooed into the phone like he used to do when Danny was little and couldn’t sleep. “I’m not talking about you, Danny. I’m talking about me. I want you to stay with me too. I’ve waited years to have you with me. So don’t ever think I’ll send you away. It’s something else, Danny. There are things I need to tell you about. Things we need to discuss. I’m not worried about you at all, kid. And I don’t want you worrying about me worrying about you. That would worry me.”

“Shitty couple of sentences there, Pop.”

“Thanks.”

“Can you give me a hint?” Danny wheedled, like a little kid shaking a Christmas present.

The wheedle didn’t work, but he could hear a smile in his father’s voice. “No. I want to talk to you face-to-face. You’ll just have to wait. And don’t be trying to imagine what it is. Or worrying about it. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just something that needs to be talked about. Okay?”

“Christ. I’m imagining things already. And none of them are good.”

His father chuckled. “I thought you might be.”

This time the silence that fell between them was slightly awkward. Slightly
too
silent, and lasting a little
too
long.

“You’re wanting to hang up, aren’t you?” Danny asked.

Danny could hear the reluctance in his dad’s voice when he said, “Yes. I need to get back to work. That okay? You going to be able to manage on your own?”

“I’ll be fine. And don’t worry about the killer coming after me. If I need help, all I have to do is stick one toe outside the yard and every cop in Christendom will be beating a path to our door. Sirens wailing, pistols blazing, attack dogs attacking, stun guns stunning.”

His father groaned. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Take care, Danny. I’ll call again tomorrow.”

“Bye, Pop.” And Danny hung up the phone.

Two seconds later the doorbell rang.

Danny clomped his way across the hardwood floor to the front door. On the off chance it was Luke, he looked down and checked himself out to make sure his fly wasn’t open and he didn’t have any food on his shirt or anything else of a humiliating nature stuck to his person before he opened the door.

When he finally
did
open the door, after taking a couple of deep breaths to calm himself down, he was happy to see it really
was
Luke. And here he thought prayers were never answered. Just goes to show how wrong you can be. Thank you, God.

Luke stood on Danny’s front porch soaked in sweat. He was still wearing the shorts and muscle shirt he had been wearing that morning, but now his clothes looked like they had been dragged through a coal mine behind a runaway tram. Apparently, emptying out a bigass truck full of furniture is dirty work. There was even a good-size tear in the shirt just above Luke’s belly button, and through the tear, Danny caught a glimpse of a beautiful flat tummy with a sprinkling of red hair scattered across it. It was the most intriguing thing Danny had seen all day. It took a burst of fortitude to prevent him from actually licking his lips at the sight.

Luke’s cheeks were flushed from being out in the sun all day. There was a smudge of dirt on his cheek, his ginger-colored hair was sticking straight up off the top of his head like he had walked into an electric fence, he had a scrape on one knee, and he was
still
gorgeous. There was a clean change of clothes and a neatly folded towel tucked under his arm like a football.

Granger was sitting at Luke’s feet, sweeping the porch with his tail, looking hopeful.

“Well, hello,” Danny said, after checking Luke over from head to toe, and probably lingering in the equatorial regions a little longer than necessary. “You look like crap. Just fall out of a plane?”

Luke laughed. “Worse than that. I’ve been working. Working sucks. I came to that conclusion about two o’clock. Oddly enough I was carrying a Panasonic TV at the time, one of the old fat ones, that must have weighed four hundred pounds. Before I could set it down, my life flashed before my eyes, and I knew then and there that me and work do not get along, and likely never
will
get along. It was an epiphany of sorts.”

“Gee.” Danny smiled. “I wish I had epiphanies.”

“No, you don’t.” Luke tugged the clean clothes and fresh towel out from under his armpit. Laying them in his arms like an offering, he thrust them in Danny’s face. “I need help. Whichever moron from the water company was supposed to turn on our water, didn’t. I’ve been waiting for it to come on all day. Not only am I begging you to let me use your shower, but I also need to borrow a few buckets of water to throw in my downstairs toilet where me and the two Neanderthals my dad hired to help unload the truck have been peeing and pooping all day. It needs to be flushed before the paint starts peeling off the walls and the EPA gets wind of it.
Literally
gets wind of it. I know it’s asking a lot, but I’m desperate. What do you say? Neighbor.”

If Danny thought not having any water in the new house would get Luke over here to shower in
his
house, Danny would have turned the guy’s water off himself. He would have chopped into Luke’s water main with an axe if he thought it would accomplish the feat. As if he wasn’t already under house arrest for vandalism and destruction of property. It was nice to know sometimes fate takes care of things you don’t think of taking care of for yourself. Who knew the world could be so prescient?

“No problem,” Danny heard himself say. He wasn’t sure, but he thought those two little words might be the understatement of the century. “Come on in.”

After Luke stepped inside, with Granger padding along beside him, Danny looked through the door to see if there was anyone else he should be ushering in, but the two Neanderthal furniture movers Luke’s dad had hired seemed to have headed back to their cave. Luke and Granger were alone. Another blessing from the fates.

Danny closed the door and tried to ignore the hammering of his heart. “Use my bathroom. It’s got the walk-in shower. Top of the stairs to the right. Ignore the room next to it that looks like it was hit with a Tomahawk missile and then bombarded with hand grenades. That’s my room. It always looks like that. I’ll go find a bucket.”

“Thanks,” Luke said and headed for the stairs. Danny watched the back of his strong, bare legs as Luke ascended the steps. The muscles in Luke’s hairy calves seemed to roll around with a mind of their own underneath their luscious reddish-blond pelt. God, they were beautiful. The thighs above the calves were even more beautiful. Danny closed his eyes before he got to Luke’s ass. He was afraid his hormones would ignite and he would go up in flames like a dried-up Christmas tree if he took a gander at
that
going up the stairs
.

Danny suddenly seemed to be infused with an avalanche of nervous energy. He couldn’t sit still. While Luke cleaned up in Danny’s bathroom, Danny went about the house like he had never been there before. Looking at stuff, touching this, rearranging that, adjusting a curtain, fluffing a throw pillow.

Then he realized what he was really doing. He was trying not to think about what was going on in that stream of shower spray he could hear thrumming overhead. He was trying not to think of Luke stepping out of his clothes. He was trying not to think of the warm water sluicing down Luke’s naked body as he stepped beneath the spray. Trying not to think of the soapsuds gathering in Luke’s pubic hair and in his armpits and trying not to think of Luke rubbing his soapy hands over his bare wet chest and sliding his soapy fingers between those two gorgeous butt cheeks Danny had been afraid to look at when the guy was climbing the stairs. Did the warm water feel so good Luke couldn’t stop his own dick from standing up and saying hello? Was Luke soaping himself down now, fully erect? Was he sliding his frothy hand up and down that erection and were Luke’s knees beginning to tremble like Danny’s did just before he came?

Jesus. Danny was hard now too. His imagination was getting way out of hand. Nothing new there, of course. Still, sometimes it was disconcerting as hell.

He gave a little jump when the water turned off upstairs. He looked down at his dick, standing straight up like a tent pole underneath the fabric of his shorts, and knew he had to do something to make the damn thing go down before Luke saw it, so he set about gathering some food together and setting the kitchen table for the two of them. Luke obviously couldn’t do much cooking if there was no water in his house, so Danny would give him dinner. Luke must be hungry after moving all that furniture.

But most importantly, setting the table and dragging the food out of the fridge gave Danny something to do that would take his mind off that damn erection he was sporting. He was trying to be neighborly here. He didn’t want to be waving his dick in Luke’s face when he came prancing down the stairs all clean and refreshed from his shower.

Well, actually Danny
did
want to be waving his dick in Luke’s face—there was nothing he wanted
more.
Just not right
now.
And it would probably never happen anyway. Danny wasn’t that lucky.

Luke appeared in the kitchen doorway like a sunrise, bright and beaming. Danny couldn’t stop himself from glancing down at his own crotch to see what state it was in. Happily, his pecker had deflated to a sociable size: still on red alert but not fully deployed. And through his baggy shorts, it hardly showed at all.

Luke watched Danny glance down at his own crotch, so he glanced down at it too. He had a quizzical expression on his face with a little smile tickling the corners of his mouth. Danny had the horrible impression Luke knew exactly what he was doing.

Danny blushed. And oddly enough, Luke blushed too.

A silence fell between the two of them. The silence was both awkward and comfortable. Both friendly and positively teeming with testosterone. One of
those
silences. Danny wasn’t sure, but he thought he could hear their heartbeats thumping away in the middle of it.

Their eyes met, and Luke’s smile widened. He motioned to the table loaded with food. “Is this all for me?”

Danny’s blush deepened to a magnificent magenta, two shades short of a stroke. “Well, yeah, I thought you might be hungry after working all day. But, you know, if you have other stuff to do, I won’t keep you. I just thought maybe—”

“I’d love to. Thanks.”

Luke dropped the ball of dirty clothes and the wet towel he was holding in his hand. Just dropped it right there in the doorway. He was in clean shorts and another tank top, just like Danny. It seemed to be the perennial uniform of the day for both of them. Except for the cast on his left leg, Danny was barefoot. So was Luke.

When Luke brushed past him to get to the table, Danny could smell Luke’s clean skin and the Ivory soap the guy had showered with and the shampoo he had used to wash his hair. Danny’s shampoo. The combination of the three scents made for such a sexy smell that for a second Danny thought he might topple over just sniffing it. God, Danny wanted to reach out and stop Luke in his tracks, pull him into his arms, run his fingers across Luke’s clean smooth skin, nuzzle his neck to smell him all the better.

But, of course, he didn’t. Danny sighed, and let Luke pass on by like a lost opportunity.

They heard a horrible scream in some other part of the house. Sounded like a banshee.

Luke grinned. “I guess my dog is pestering your cat. Sorry.”

Danny shrugged. “Don’t be. That cat’s a cunt.”

They laughed.

Luke’s hair was still damp. Wet like that, it was really red, Danny noticed. Much more so than it was when it was dry. Danny watched as Luke swung a bare leg over the back of the kitchen chair and plopped himself down. He arranged his silverware neatly beside his plate, since Danny had just sort of tossed it on the table, not caring where it all went. Then while Danny still stood there watching him, Luke reached across the table and arranged Danny’s silverware too.

When he was finished, Luke motioned to the opposite chair. “Sit,” he said. “Eat. I’m starved.”

And Danny finally expelled the breath of air he had been holding for the longest time. He sank into the chair, happy to get off his wobbly legs, and they both started loading their plates with all kinds of stuff. Potato salad, ham, pickles, bread, coleslaw, cold pizza left over from a couple of days ago, cold green beans that had been in the fridge for God knows how long but didn’t stink yet so they must be okay. They ate as eighteen-year-olds always eat. With tons of enthusiasm and not a speck of conversation.

Chomping away at a mouthful of food, Luke tugged his chair in a little closer, and their knees bumped into each other underneath the table. Luke acted like he hadn’t noticed, so Danny did the same, but for the next ten minutes Danny did not taste one single bite of food he put in his mouth. All his senses were centered on the brush of Luke’s hard, hairy knees against his own and the easy, gentle pressure that kept them there. Danny wondered what would happen if he simply crawled across the table, swept the food onto the floor with a crash like they do in the movies, and ripped Luke’s clothes off his body right then and there. He imagined them writhing around naked in the potato salad, a slice of ham dangling off Danny’s ear, a green bean stuck in his nose, Luke’s balls pressed against his chin.