“Lovely morning, isn’t it?” Whitman waved to two middle-aged, speed-walking women, who smiled and waved back. “Stop by on your way back. We’ve got coffee.”

He gestured to the table that he and Travis had just finished setting up. It held a lock box for money, two trays of pastries courtesy of his trip to Copper Beach yesterday afternoon before movie night, and a carafe of coffee with recycled paper cups.

The front door to Travis’s house opened and Caitlyn peered out. Her hair was rumpled and she still had a pillow crease down one cheek. She peeked at her phone, then at him, and went back inside.

“She’ll be fine once she gets some coffee,” Travis said, though he wouldn’t convince anyone that he believed his own words. “I can’t believe you’re doing this for us.”

“I told you. If you went with Sunday like you planned, you’d get terrible results. It’s best to do it first thing on Saturday. Besides, I love a good yard sale,” Whitman said as he rubbed his hands together with glee. “Haggling over prices. Watching people light up when they find just the right thing. It’s the simple things in life.”

Travis gave him a soft smile that didn’t imply he was crazy at all and started to walk toward Molly’s. “I’ll try to get off work as early as I can.”

“We’ll be fine.” Whitman waved him off. “But I hereby use this as my excuse to reserve your help for trivia and movie nights for the remainder of the summer.”

“Like I wasn’t going to help you with those anyway.” Travis was facing the other direction, but Whitman could hear the smirk in his voice.

Travis had to get to work, so Whitman bit back the retort that Travis hadn’t been there last night. He had known beforehand, of course, because Travis had asked him that afternoon about price tags for the garage sale. Hypothetically, Travis had said, because he was supposed to have worked on pricing all week. Whitman imagined Travis in a flurry of multi-colored stickers on Friday evening, like he had the sticker pox.

After the previous movie night, Whitman hoped the he and Travis would sit together again. He brought some candy from home to share and ended up eating the entire box of chocolate himself. He realized he was chasing, even after all of the internal dialogues where he told himself he was only trying to help Travis and Caitlyn, that he only wanted to be his – their – friend. After last night, with his sad candy and his head craning at every footstep, he couldn’t deceive himself any longer.

Whitman had it bad for Travis Butler.

He didn’t have long to dwell on the realization, because right at seven thirty, an older couple walked up the driveway and Caitlyn re-opened the front door a smidge to let a white furball with attached leash trailing, race toward him.

“Good morning, Mr. Wigglesworth,” Whitman said with serious earnest. “I don’t have anything for you – oh that would have been a good idea. Treats for the dogs.”

At Whitman’s unfortunate use of the word treat, Mr. Wigglesworth demonstrated how he earned his name. Thank God he now had Caitlyn entered in his phone, so he shot off a text asking her to bring some out. He grabbed the end of Mr. Wigglesworth’s leash and led him around the driveway so the dog could sniff the pants legs of the two customers as he offered them coffee and pastries.

The couple bought a ceramic angel figurine and a belt, and left as three more customers arrived.

Whitman worked alone for the next half hour, reducing their inventory by almost a quarter, before Caitlyn came out of the house carrying the bag of dog treats in her teeth and using her hands to pull her wet hair back into a ponytail. Whitman raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“No one is going to be up this early,” Caitlyn grumbled and took the seat behind the table.

“I’ll have you know I’ve already made you guys over a hundred bucks,” Whitman said and chuckled when Caitlyn’s eyes popped. “Admittedly, most of it was from that awful gold baker’s rack, but still. Not bad for a half hour’s work.”

“Do you think we’ll make enough to get a new couch?” Caitlyn asked as she snagged one of the pastries and stuffed half of it in her mouth. “I wanted to paint too. If we don’t make enough for new furniture, maybe we can at least paint some of what we already have. Make it not so –” Caitlyn shuddered instead of finishing her sentence. “I love my mom, but her taste was like, from the nineties.”

“I’m sure you’ll get enough to make a dent in the nineties in there,” Whitman said while trying not to laugh at Caitlyn’s extreme reaction. Their house did remind him of a funeral parlor, all blandly tasteful, which did not sound like it fit with Travis’s description of his mom at all. “If you don’t get enough for a couch, you can always make a slipcover for it.”

“I don’t know how to sew.”

“If you ask nicely, I just might teach you.”

“Really?” Caitlyn sloshed coffee over the side of her cup in her surprise, and after setting the cup back down on the table, held her hand down for Mr. Wigglesworth to lick clean. “You sew?”

“I may or may not have gone through a cosplay phase in college. No, there are no pictures. Thank God.”

And thank God for the new customers approaching to haggle over the sticker on a handful of old John Denver albums. Whitman was not going to budge. Those suckers were collector’s items … for someone.

When Travis left that morning for work, the driveway was three long aisles of stuff, reaching from the house to the street. He fully expected it to look the same when he finished his shift at three in the afternoon.

Instead, he found Caitlyn chatting with Layla on the lawn, tossing a ball back and forth and laughing as Mr. Wigglesworth scampered and failed each time to snag it from them. He found the items on the driveway had shifted to one long line on the far side and nothing more. The rest of the driveway was empty except for the lockbox table and chair, and even there, the pastries and coffee had long since been depleted. He found Whitman in deep conversation with Mr. Tynan.

Travis still couldn’t believe that Whitman had volunteered to do this for him. Sure, he had helped him clean and sort, and had gotten dinners out of the bargain, but this kind of dedication was next level. Travis didn’t care if Whitman was the world’s greatest yard sale aficionado, he had to have ulterior motives in doing all this.

Travis wanted him to have an ulterior motive. His mind had drifted to nothing but Whitman all day, picturing Whitman sitting outside his house like he belonged there or Whitman coming inside for a dinner that didn’t also involve clearing out the house or wading into memory-murky waters. He had missed the movie last night, and instead had taken matters into his own hands. But instead of imagining porn like usual, it was fantasizing warm hands sliding across rough blankets to touch his that had him coming on his stomach in an embarrassingly quick fashion.

Then again, Travis hoped Whitman didn’t have an ulterior motive. Because whatever flirtation was budding between them couldn’t be allowed to grow, no matter how lonely and horny Travis was, and how kind and thoughtful and intuitive Whitman proved to be.

The problem was that Travis had barely gotten to experience being a single gay man before having to return home and replace the title with single gay parental figure. As soon as Caitlyn graduated and moved on to college, Travis had every intention of making up for lost time. Whitman was older and more experienced, but Travis couldn’t picture him hooking up just for fun. Whitman probably needed feelings involved, which was a bad idea for Travis.

Nothing was going to keep him from his second escape from Slat Creek in a year’s time.

“How was work?” Whitman asked as Travis approached.

“Same as usual. I brought you an egg salad and a bunch of leftover oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.” Travis raised the brown paper bag in salute, though it was Caitlyn who ran up and grabbed the bag from his hand.

“I’m starving.”

“Save two of the sandwiches for us,” Travis called as she and Layla raced to the front door with Mr. Wigglesworth on their heels. “And some cookies.” He had little hope for those, though. “Was she any help at all?”

“Of course,” Whitman said, his eyes crinkling with a smile. “But she hated the haggling part.”

“Softy.”

“I was just working out a deal with Mr. Tynan here,” Whitman redirected Travis’s attention to his across-the-street neighbor. “Any clothing that hasn’t sold by the end of the day will be boxed up and donated to St. Andrew’s.”

“We have a donations center for the homeless,” Mr. Tynan explained, pulling his cardigan tighter around his frame even though it was the middle of summer. Travis had never seen the man without one, or without his reading glasses hanging from a string around his neck. “And some of those books,” he waved at the stack of young adult and new adult LGBT novels that Travis had collected during high school, “would be great for our PFLAG library.”

“You have a PFLAG library?”

Travis had already known about the donations center. Many times he had seen Mr. Tynan out front struggling, arms full with meals for the sick or homeless, boxes of books that he took to bedridden members of his church, and bags of clothing for the donations center, and had raced across the street to keep the old man from throwing out his back. Mr. Tynan seemed like he couldn’t keep himself from trying to help people, so he shouldn’t have been surprised with the PFLAG revelation.

“The meetings are held monthly at St. Andrew’s, so we keep a corner of our meeting room set aside for all things PFLAG. There are pamphlets and educational DVDs, as well as some for purely entertainment purposes. Anything to help these kids and their families.”

Travis kept from saying how nice a little support like that would have been when he was a kid, but Mr. Tynan almost oozed regret from his pores, and making a kind, older man feel guilty was not worth the vindication.

Travis hefted the box of books and turned to Mr. Tynan. “Would you like me to load them into your car for you?”