by Ali Lyda
I could also block out how Gordo seemed to be leaving his house early so he wouldn’t run into me. Or how he always seemed to need to leave the youth center as soon as I showed up. He was avoiding me, and I should be used to this shit by now, but it fucking stung.
Whenever I stuttered, people always became uncomfortable. I’d been dealing with it since I was a small child. First came the wide-eyed surprise—oh, gosh, a stutter? Then came the sympathy, which made me so angry it felt like my insides would rattle to pieces. If I was lucky, they spoke to me normally, and then avoided me. If I was unlucky, they spoke to me slowly, as if having a speech impediment stifled my ability to understand.
At least Gordo was in the category of ignore-the-freaks. I didn’t think I could handle it if he spoke to me like I was stupid.
“You’re being a little heavy-handed,” Mia said to me.
This was my third tattoo for her, and she was trusting me with a massive amount of space—I was creating a tiger that curved, angry and deadly, down her ribs and onto the thigh. Today’s session was for inking her ribs, a notoriously painful spot. But she was tough as nails, so if she said I was being heavy-handed, then I was.
Which meant that for once my job wasn’t doing its job, which was letting me fucking forget.
“S-sorry,” I said before I dipped the needles into the black pot of ink and prepared for a new pass.
“No worries,” she replied, but her voice was high and tight, and there was no missing the way she kept her abs clenched, as if that could protect her from the pain.
I needed to be more gentle and pay better attention. Fucking up with clients like her, either by not being sensitive to pain or by doing a shitty tattoo, was the best way to dry up future clients. Her ink and her word were my bread and butter.
“What’s up?” she asked. “You seem out of it, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
I shook my head. “Nah. It’s okay.”
Even with trusted clients, I try to keep my speaking to a minimum.
“Girl trouble?” she guessed, though it sounded like she was unsure of her choice. I smiled at her and shook my head again. “Ah, boy trouble then.”
That was the moment my best friend and most irritating coworker decided to butt his loud mouth in.
“Oh, yeah, Javi here’s all torn up over his hot neighbor,” Dane said.
“Oh? I wish my neighbor was hot. I live next to this incel neckbeard who thinks my tattoos are an invitation to say the creepiest things. Tell me more about this dreamy neighbor.”
“He’s a dad, and he’s bold as hell. Javi was having this party, right? And there we were…”
Once again, Dane talked all over me. Or for me. But this was how we worked. He knew I didn’t like to talk because of the stutter, that I preferred to watch people. There was something so lovely about seeing people when they don’t know you’re looking—it was like the curtain fell, and I got to know the real them.
Besides, when Dane spoke for me, it wasn’t personal, the way it was with some people who didn’t think I could talk for myself. He wasn’t even trying to protect me from my stutter. He just really loved the sound of his own voice and, luckily for him, I didn’t mind it, either.
Dane could fill silence like it was his job. He knew how to make people laugh, how to get them to ease up, how to make them happy. Which I very much needed.
Only at the moment his humor wasn’t helping, making my client laugh while I had the needle against her skin. “P-please don’t m-move so much, Mia.”
There was a wobble to one of the lines that I would have to make bolder than I liked in order to hide it, but it was her laughter that made it funky in the first place, so I couldn’t beat myself up over it too much.
Three hours passed that way. Dane talking to Mia, keeping her distracted while I occasionally had to remind her to sit still and worked on getting a large chunk of the outline finished up. She could normally sit for longer, but the ribs truly did take a toll on the toughest of customers. By the time I wiped her down with some peppermint oil and antiseptic and bandaged her up, Mia looked ready to sleep for ten hours. Adrenaline crashed, I bet.
After she left (and she left me a substantial tip that I owed, in part, to Dane), Dane came over and helped me clean up.
“You, my friend, need to go out,” he said.
“D-do I?”
His smile was wicked and his eyes twinkled with delight. “Hell, yes, you do. You need some beer and some fucker’s junk rubbing all up on you to turn your frown upside down. This might be the longest I’ve seen you go without sex since the Great Dry Spell of 2015. If I recall correctly, and you know that I do, you were an enormous ass after your flirtation with celibacy.”
“I wasn’t celibate, you ass. I just wanted to t-try being in love for once.” Not that it had turned out well for me. If anything, those awful trial relationships had solidified in my mind that I’d never have what it took to gain a boyfriend, a husband, a family.
Some things just weren’t meant to be for people like me.
Dane’s gaze softened, and I hurried back to my station for a final sweep, unable to take his pity. Still, he wasn’t wrong. I missed the release of sex. I liked feeling wanted, even if just for a night. Before the voices in my head kicked in and reminded me that some things are too broken to fix. And that broken things don’t deserve love.
“Okay. Where t-to?”
“Legends, obviously.”
The only gay bar in town. I looked at the tattoo gun. It hadn’t kept me distracted like it was supposed to, which meant I needed to try something different. Something different with a six-pack, and hair I could pull while riding hard. “Done.”
The lights at the club were manic, the kind of rave fever-dream that sends inebriated souls into a trance. Despite Dane’s attempts, I stayed sober-ish, pacing myself with a beer an hour as I watched Dane flirt and dance his way through all of the new faces in the bar.
Drinking was something I tended to avoid. In my teens and twenties, when I’d felt ferociously rebellious, there’d been drinking. A lot of drinking. Never drugs—my parents’ addictions had scared me off—but I’d get black-out drunk on the regular. At the time, it was because being wasted erased my self-consciousness about my stutter. It helped me pretend I could connect with people, flirt, and believe that they were actually interested in me.
But as I’d grown older, I also learned it made the stutter much worse. If I was any sheets to the wind, I was also fairly unintelligible, and any interest had been toward my body only. All the ease had only been in my mind.
So tonight, I nursed my beer and scanned the bar. Dane liked to work up close and personal, charming his targets before they (or he) even knew they were in his sights. I liked the stand-off approach. Watching people drink showed a lot of who they were. I’d gotten good at figuring out who tops and who bottoms, who’s into rough sex and sensual play, and the ones who wouldn’t pout too much when I never called them back after sleeping together, just from observing the way they moved through the club. It made things easier.
When I peered at a back corner, I saw a man who looked suspiciously like Gordo. Heat pricked at my cheeks, my responses already heightened by the beer. The frustration of his reaction to my stutter was a slow burn, eating away inside of me. The only thing worse than the itching irritation of him avoiding me was the steadily growing desire inside of me that still wanted to see him.
He intrigued me. He was so different around his daughter—his appearance and mannerisms, even when angered, were relaxed. At the youth center, though, he’d been all angles. Jutting chin and squared shoulders and a sharpness that gutted when I tried to understand him. It had been so long since someone’s reaction had wounded me deeply. It should have sent me running from Gordo, but for some reason, it just pulled me in even more.
I couldn’t stop looking at the doppelganger. The man had the same brown hair as Gordo, that fell in heavy chunks. Even in the crazed lighting, I could tell he had the same dark eyes,
brown that bordered on black. And all I felt was interest. Want.
Fuck.
That’s when I saw him—Gordo himself—lean out of his booth as he laughed with the person next to him. My stomach lurched when I realized that he was there, actually there in the gay bar, and clearly related to the man I’d stared at before, who was probably not just a random doppelganger.
As soon as I’d spotted Gordo, everything else faded to black. When Gordo laughed, he became a work of art. Gone were the hard lines and rigid muscles. All that was left was a jawline that demanded to be kissed and rounded shoulders I wanted to cling to.
This didn’t look like the man at the youth center who’d been all business, or the bedraggled father I saw with his daughter. This Gordo seemed younger, carefree, and dangerously attractive. There was so much to him, so many sides that made up a mystery my heart was begging to solve.
Or my cock, at the least, which was now rigid in my jeans.
My beer became vile, a sour taste in my mouth. My mind spun as I began to process that I was seeing Gordo in a gay bar. He’d never mentioned a wife, and I hadn’t seen another person—man or woman—staying at his house. Not that I’d been looking closely, of course. Just every minute that I was home.
But a part of me had assumed that there must be someone else, especially with Giuliana’s young age. My mind raced, trying to think of a time when Gordo had mentioned a partner or wife, or a time I’d seen another car at his house. Anything. But there was… nothing. If he was at this club, did that mean he was gay? Bisexual at the least? And God, what did that mean for me?
As if he’d heard my thoughts, Gordo looked up and spotted me. Our eyes locked, and lust blazed in me, hot and fierce, my balls beginning to ache even while my mind screamed bad idea. My neighbor’s eyes went wide with surprise, but he didn’t look upset or awkward like I’d expected him to.
No, Gordo flashed me a smile, and I grabbed a hold of the bar counter to steady myself. Because if he was smiling, if he wanted to see me, then what the hell had he been saying at the center that day? Why had he been avoiding me?
What was this thing between us?
He turned to his friends and said something before getting up and making his way through the dancers toward me. My mouth was dry but my drink was the last thing I wanted. In my chest, my heart was beating a staccato rhythm. My gaze slid to the door. I could go. Wave a small but noncommittal wave and duck and dodge until I was out of the club and running for the hills. Or, at the least, the safety of my house. Right next door to his.
Fuck. It was time to man up.
And then the opportunity to run was over, anyway. Gordo was close now, beelining for me, his stare never wavering. I leaned against the bar for support.
“Our paths keep crossing, Neighbor,” Gordo said with a slight slur. I only noticed it because years of dealing with my own speech impediment had honed my ear for anyone who sounded different even if it wasn’t different in the same way I sounded different.
Gordo, it seemed, was at least tipsy and possibly on his way to drunk.
“I d-d-didn’t expect to see you in here,” I said, not knowing what reply I was hoping for in response.
Gordo smirked, loose and easy, and I fought back the sudden, overwhelming temptation to kiss the smirk off of him. “Likewise. It is a very nice surprise.”
My cock twitched in my pants. If he looked down, there’d be no hiding how attracted to him I was. “Thanks,” I said, the sting of blush plucking at my neck and cheeks. “Out with friends?”
“Hmm.” His eyes squeezed shut, and he seemed to sway. I almost grabbed him, but pulled back at the last minute when he opened his eyes to stare at me again. “My best friend and my brother.”
Best friend and brother. The kind of guys I’d bring if I needed wingmen. If I was jonesing for a hookup. And he’d crossed the room to talk to me.
“Look,” Gordo said, suddenly frowning as he struggled to look serious. He swayed again, and I was beginning to suspect he’d had a lot to drink. “I want to apologize. I didn’t mean for you to think I didn’t want to work with you at the center. It’s just that it’s my first design job on my own, and I was nervous. Seeing you there didn’t help.”
I tried to casually shrug, though it had never even occurred to me that I had made him—someone so handsome and professional—nervous.
“It’s okay.” I breathed in, fighting the urge to clam up. “I know the s...s-s-s-...I know how I speak can be hard to work with.”
My hands strained at my side. I wanted to sign. I wanted to be able to avoid digging this hole any deeper. Gordo was apologizing, and I could just accept it and we’d be, well, neighbors still. Friendly neighbors, and nothing more than that, but okay.
My fucking mouth, though, felt thick and like it had a mind of its own. And Gordo was definitely drunk, standing close enough that I could feel the sear of his heat through my clothes and smell the beer on his breath. It made my head swim, like secondary intoxication. And I wanted more.
“Javi,” Gordo replied, leaning in close enough that I inhaled sharply. “I don’t care about the stutter. The truth is, I don’t know if I can work with you because you’re so fucking sexy.”
His words were like a slap in the face, leaving me reeling and scrambling to understand what had just happened. Did Gordo just come on to me? My cock grew hard in my jeans, responding to his declaration and his closeness and the fact that it had been weeks since I’d been laid.
Someone bumped into Gordo as they tried to get the bartender’s attention. He wobbled then began to fall. Without thinking, my hands flashed out, and I grabbed his hips to steady him, digging my fingers into the flesh of his hip. A surge of molten desire shot through me. Touching him was like touching a star—it would burn me to ash but goddamn, it was worth it.
When he regained his balance, he was closer than ever. And not moving away from my touch.
I licked my lips, for once unsure of the next course of action. If this were any other man, I’d be grabbing his shirt and pulling him in for a kiss. But this was my neighbor, and someone I was supposed to collaborate with for the center. That center was a sacred space, and if I fucked things up with Gordo, I’d have nowhere safe to hide.
Gordo looked at my mouth with hunger in his brown eyes. I gulped. I should let go of him. I should step away before he had a chance to tear down any more of my walls that he didn’t even realize were there, before I let him wreak havoc on the safe life I’d crafted for myself. A life where romance and relationships had no place.
Instead I was frozen, and Gordo was leaning in, his mouth parted, and I knew he was going to kiss me.
I realized I was going to let him.
Then just before our mouths met, Gordo lurched to the side, bending hard at the waist—and proceeded to vomit all over my pants and shoes.
7
Gordo
Oh, God, my mouth tasted awful. Thick and sticky and sour. It tasted like regret. When I looked at my phone, I almost heaved out of surprise (or possibly from the raging hangover that already pressed into my brain). It was after ten in the morning. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept past five in the morning. Wait, no, I could—it was before Giuliana.
Jesus, what kind of parent leaves their child with their brother for the night to go get wasted? Assholes who didn’t deserve to be parents, that’s who. And I was her only parent, which made me feel about a hundred times worse. I didn’t deserve her.
My body seemed to go on alert then, aware on a cellular level that she wasn’t in the house. It was as if her absence tugged at me and demanded I bring her close immediately. But she was at my brother’s house, and I wouldn’t be able to see her yet, which needed to change. I called my sister-in-law.
“Hello, Dad-of-the-Year!” Dana sang out, way too happily.
Her cheerful voice blasted through the phone, and my pounding head was not prepared. I groaned. She didn’t wait for me to get my feet under me before continuing.
Dana always did manage to bust Mason’s and my chops while being generous and comforting at the same time. Neither of us deserved her.
“Okay. Sounds good.” My voice was more a croak than human language. “Thanks for taking care of her.”
The sigh I received was heavy with joy. “Any time, Gordo. Giuliana is a dream of a baby.”
“See you soon.”
Sure, she’s a great baby. Which is why I can’t believe I’m messing so much of this up. How did I not know being a father would be so unbelievably hard?
“Drink some water,” Dana said before hanging up.
I rolled onto my back. My mouth wasn’t the only thing that felt gross—I was still in last night’s clothes, apparently. My sheets felt damp with sweat and smelled like the gin I’d too freely imbibed at the club.
Mason had said I needed a night out, some time to not be a dad. Or, at least, I think he meant I needed some time to not feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. As if Giuliana were a heft I could set aside at any time to catch a breather. As if I could set her, with her gorgeous cheeks and heavenly baby smell, aside. As if I’d want to. The thought made me queasy.
I’d told Mason that I was always a dad now, but then admitted that I could use some time away from the constant pressure of taking care of Giuliana on my own while also starting my freelance business. That was all the leeway he’d needed to suggest a night at the gay bar, not even hiding the fact that he and Dana must have decided I needed a new man in my life.
If only I could explain to them that dating wouldn’t make things easier—it would make everything exponentially harder.
