[ 3 ]
She orders a tea with no lemon because lemons make her queasy. She decides she only wants a salad because she’s got this goal of losing fifteen pounds by the fifteenth. Her name is Sandy and she’s wearing something and her hair is some kind of color and blah, blah, blah.
“Are you alright?”
I lift my eyebrows. “Sorry?”
She nibbles at a forkful of greens with the daintiness of some princess, overlooking the massive burger and fries I ordered for myself with judgment. “You seem a bit preoccupied. I hope I’m not boring you.”
“Not at all. Sorry, I didn’t know I—”
“This was sprung on me too,” she admits with a shrug, chewing. “If you’d rather just call it a night and, I don’t know, meet up another time maybe, I’m just fine and dandy with that.”
Her Texan accent is thick and borderline annoying, if it weren’t for the fact that she’s so damn nice. Actually, her niceness is annoying too. I don’t want to be here.
“Nah, it’s alright,” I say instead after struggling to swallow a stale fry. I hate Kegs & Dregs. I hate everything. “We’re here, so …”
“Trent told me you work in sales?”
I roll my eyes. “What he means by that is, I’m a retail clerk. Lame, I know, but it’s just a day job until I get the chance to do what I really want.”
“And that’s …?”
“Take over my pop’s business,” I answer after swallowing a bite of dried-out burger. I really, really hate Kegs. “He’s got a store off Stoneridge and Fourth. I always wanted to own my own store, call the shots.”
“You like being in charge?”
“Usually.” I throw back my Coke. Even that’s flat. I fucking hate Kegs.
I hear her moan. When I look up, I find her face wrinkled in disgust, staring across the room. I turn, following her line of sight.
The likely capturer of her attention is the local gay. Poor fool is all on his own on the dance floor, wagging his ass and flinging his arms around like four pinwheels. He is such a faggy McFaggerson. Dressed in a skin-tight yellow shirt with some angel-looking thing on the front and pants that he probably pulled from a woman’s rack at Macy’s, he dances all alone to the pop country music that’s pumping the bar tonight. He’s basically “the gay guy in town”. If I talked to him, I’m one hundred percent sure I’d get at least a blowjob. I could have my gay cherry popped, just like that.
So why does he bother me so much?
Just in this moment, he turns around, his eyes connecting with mine. We went to school together, even though we never talked, but when he looks at me, he seems almost startled. Then a twisty sort of smile happens on his face and, as if inspired by my watching him, he dances with even more vigor than before. It’s like I’m paying witness to some sort of gay mating ritual. This weird peacock is trying to wake little Benny between my thighs. He’s not yet successful.
“I don’t know why he comes here,” my date Sandy says after sipping her no-lemon water. “No one wants him around.”
Despite finding the flamer annoying as a fly in my dinner and never having had a thing to do with him in my life, I’m struck with a sudden desire to defend the little shit. “He’s out there, but he ain’t hurtin’ no one.”
“He’s hurtin’ my eyes.” She rolls said eyes, then fixes them on me, smiling. “Trent said you were old-fashioned. I love an old-fashioned boy. You seem awful sweet.”
“Thanks.” I sneak another glance at the Dancing Queen. When he spins around, I see his little tight ass in those bright pants that might as well be painted on him with blue and white inks. His skinny jeans rival Trent’s. To be fair, he doesn’t have that bad an ass. I’d grab a handful of it if he wasn’t shaking the thing so desperately on that dance floor.
My attention is drawn back to my date when I feel her foot graze my leg. I turn and lift a brow, as if to ask the precise question of: what the fuck? She smiles coyly, as if she’s up to nothing, then says, “If you’re not into something serious, we can just … have a little fun back at my place, Mr. old-fashioned.” She gives a wink, then sucks down some water from the straw, as if to suggest precisely what sort of “fun” she has in mind.
I’m not gonna lie—I’m tempted. After my recent frequently-recurring dreams involving Trent almost fucking me, I’m charged up as a lightning bolt and ready to be set off by just about anything.
I look back and find the homo’s mercifully removed his party-of-one off the dance floor, having taken a seat at the bar. The stool to either side of him once occupied a dude; now they’re both empty. He certainly knows how to clear a bar. That’s a skill I might like to utilize sometimes on a busy Saturday night.
“What the fuck?”
I return my gaze to Sandy, the source of the outburst. “Huh?”
“You gonna just ignore me all night? A sweet ol’ gal like me?” She purses her lips, seeming to suck her tongue in annoyance.
The burger stares me in the face like a half-opened mouth drooling ketchup and gooey diced onions. I’ve decidedly lost my appetite. “I gotta take a piss.”
Ignoring her scandalized face, I abandon the table and slump to the bathroom. When the door shuts behind me, all the clatter and twang of country music and drunken banter goes away. All I’m left with is a wet countertop, two dirty urinals, a stall I couldn’t be dared to touch, and a big smudgy mirror through which I see the semi-handsome face of a guy with everything going for him—a guy who will, despite his appeal, be heading home alone tonight. Again.
The door opens behind me and I can’t be bothered to turn around, opting to just stare at my own baby blues in the mirror. I think about Trent, wondering what he’s doing right now. Is he scaling his girlfriend’s wall where some ivy grows? Is he bumping her on her parent’s bed? Is he helping her with her math homework?
“You aren’t gettin’ any prettier.”
I turn to look at the bathroom’s newest occupant. It’s the guy from the dance floor. Upon closer inspection, the angel on his shirt is actually a winged skeleton creature with a sword in either hand. No idea what the fuck it is, but it doesn’t look like it takes it up the ass.
“Huh?” I finally respond, still staring at his shirt, studying it.
“Looking at your face in the mirror, you aren’t getting any prettier,” he says, coming up to my side to get a look at his own. He presses a few fingers into his cheek, lifting the skin, then letting go and watching it drop. “And neither the fuck am I.”
His name’s Charlie. We went to school together too, same school Trent and I and every other loser in this town went to, except back then Charlie wasn’t so … colorful. He was just another face in the school band.
He twists his eyes, looking at me from the side of his face. “You gonna hide in here from your date all night? Pretty sure she’d go for you. You’re the prettiest guy I see around.”
“Don’t call me pretty.”
“You were missed when you ran off to college for those one and a half tiny years,” he goes on as if he didn’t hear me. “You, Trent and whoever else thought they could climb outta this hellhole. Welcome back to hell.” He gives himself an air-kiss in the mirror.
“What do you mean I was missed?”
“Here, you notice every tiny change. Also all the hundreds of things that never change. Loneliness is real, girl, and it sucks hard. And not in the below-the-waist way.” He squints at me. “Are you really happy here?”
“Yeah,” I answer a bit quickly, not really giving it an honest consideration.
He snorts, as if calling me out, then heads to the farthest urinal, unzips his pants. “I’ll tell you something,” he says as he starts to pee. I look away, rolling my eyes. “It sucks being me in this town. High school was easier when I was pretending to be someone else.”
“What the fuck makes you think I care?”
“No one does,” he says, finishing and zipping up. The already stuffy room fills with the uproar of a flush. He pushes up next to me to wash his hands. I back out of the way, but only an inch or two. “You pretty boys think you have it all, with your pretty girl dates and your pretty wives and your gym memberships. And really,”—he shuts off the faucet, wipes his hands on his thighs—“you kinda do.”
With that, he leaves the bathroom.
It takes me a full minute to gather my resolve and get the hell out of the bathroom. The noise of chatter and thumping country music assaults me, and when I reach my table, the bitch is gone. She left a note on top of my half-eaten burger, scribbled across a napkin: Thanks for a great time, asshole. I’m also pretty sure she spit in my drink.
Great. Stranded at my favorite bar in the world, no ride, no date, no nothing. I pull out a twenty, bothered to all hell, and fling it on the table. With one last smirk at the empty dance floor and the idiots guffawing at the bar, I make my leave of Kegs.
Outside in the nearly pitch-dark lot, I pull out my phone and call Trent. Goes straight to voicemail. I call him again, sighing. Again, no answer from fuckface. I imagine him doing things to that probably-underage wonder girl … things I wish he’d do to me. It pisses me off so much, thinking about the simple things I long for—a cuddle, a kiss, holding hands, being told something nice—and the things I get instead: ditched by my date, sassed by the town homo in the bathroom, and then getting stranded. I could go for an all-nighter with Trent on the X-Box right about now.
I’m about to call him again when I hear the scuffling of shoes against pavement. I turn to see shadows dancing around the bend of the building, somewhere near the dumpsters. At once I assume some sort of mugging or raping or crime is happening and, to my shame, my first instinct is to run away or leap back into the building. For some insane reason, I pursue the noise, coming around the corner.
It’s Charlie, pinned against the wall by two flannel-wearing men in cowboy hats. One of them is threatening Charlie verbally, the other one scowling and looking mighty red-faced, even in the dark. What’s interesting is the expression on Charlie’s face. For being accosted—or robbed or beat up or whatever—by these two considerably larger men, Charlie looks almost … bored.
“What’s going on?” I say loudly.
Only the two men turn their heads to look at me. I recognize one of them: Steve’s his name, a jock I knew back in high school. He had an infestation of crabs and had to miss two days of school. He had the “flu”, he kept insisting; his ex let everyone know otherwise. “Go away, Benny,” he barks, annoyed. “I’m taking care of business.”
“What kinda business?” I throw back.
“Taking out the trash,” the angry one says to Charlie’s face, then spits in it.
Charlie, as unbothered as a snail on the wall, simply smirks and closes one eye, the saliva crawling down his cheek.
Seeing as they’re doing this barehanded and without weaponry involved, I dare to take a few steps toward them.
“For two grown men, you sure are taking your time,” I remark.
Shouldn’t have said that. Incensed by my quip, he throws a fist into Charlie’s belly. Charlie rasps, his eyes going wide. Then Steve throws another right into his abdomen, folding Charlie in half.
I come up next to them. “Go home, dude. You’re drunk. I’ll finish off the fag.”
“When the fuck am I not drunk?” Steve snorts at me, then massages his knuckles as if the punch hurt his hand more than Charlie. “This fucker tried to grab my buddy’s junk at the bar.”
“Yeah,” I say, watching as Charlie rises back up, that same bored expression taking his face as he stares at Steve, daring him. “He was checking me out in the bathroom too. Let me take care of him.”
Steve, the red rage burning in his eyes, finally backs off, stepping away. His buddy seems to have lost all interest, slumping off toward the parking lot.
When Steve looks at me, he says, “Give him hell. Let him know his kind ain’t welcome here. Boy gotta learn to respect, know what I mean? Fuckin’ queers think they can touch anything they want.”
“I got this.”
“Nah. Fuck him up. I wanna watch.”
“You’re still on probation, aren’t you? For that bar fight last month? You don’t wanna get caught up in this.” I stare at Steve, hard. “Like I said, I got this. Go.”
Steve snorts, curling and uncurling his fingers several times before finally leaving. I stand in front of Charlie now, my bright eyes locked onto his dark, daring ones. I listen as the two cowboys walk away. I hear the roar of a truck like some mighty dragon in the dark, and then it slithers away into the night.
When there is only silence, in a quiet, calm voice, I say, “What the heck were you doing grabbin’ some guy’s junk, Charlie?”
“I didn’t grab nothin’,” he says tiredly with half-open eyelids. “Only thing I’m guilty of is being a queer. Oops, sue me.” He smirks and looks away, tired of it all.
I don’t really believe him, to be honest. I’m pretty sure he did something at the bar, considering how forward he was with me in the damn bathroom. Pretty boy this, pretty boy that. Part of me wants to say he asked for this, what with the way he was acting.
I’m not sure what the other part of me feels. “You alright otherwise?”
“Dandy.”
I look him over. “You … got a car?”
He looks at me, suspicious. “Yes. Why? You gonna try and take it from me?”
“No. I need a ride home.”
“And … that’s my problem, how?”
“I just saved you from getting your ass kicked,” I retort, feeling my breath go all over his face. He blinks it away. “You owe me.”
“I got gut-punched. Twice. I could’ve handled them myself. I owe you nothin’ but a swift kick in the balls,” he says, then looks down my body, reconsidering. “Or a swift lick of your balls, whichever you’d allow.”
I feel my cock jump in my pants, hearing that. “Neither.”
“I could’a taken them both,” he insists again. “Steve and his wannabe cowboy.”
“In the ass?”
He smiles suddenly, impressed by my wit, I guess. Then, looking smart, he says, “I’ll give you that ride. And I promise to keep my hands to myself, so long as you let me blast whatever I want on the radio.”
Car ride of gay hell, party of two. “Deal.”