by Nicole Thorn
“That’s so sweet,” Sam said. “You guys can’t survive without each other.”
I let out a hard sigh. “You never shut the hell up, do you?”
He smiled. “I think we were together for long enough that you can answer that question yourself.”
“If you’re going to act like this, then go home,” I said. “If you make Jay uncomfortable—”
“I remember when you were that protective over me,” Sam said, almost wistfully. “You got into almost fights all the time…”
“That’s because you’d provoke people and I didn’t want you to get your ass beaten,” I growled, not amused anymore.
Sam still smiled. “It was the most beautiful thing that I remember from our relationship.”
I let him wax poetic, because at least he stopped talking about Jay. Sam could go on and on about our relationship, but one of the reasons I had been relieved to break up with him was because of all the fights he wanted to think fondly about. It got exhausting, trying to keep Sam out of trouble, and one day I realized that if we had had a real relationship, it wouldn’t have felt like that. Mostly because he wouldn’t put me in awkward situations all the time, but also because it wouldn’t feel like work.
“But!” Sam said, holding his hands up. “Our time together is done, and while I’m sure that you dream that we could go back, we never can. So, you might as well bang Jay.”
I choked on air. “What?”
“We both know that you want to,” Sam said, shrugging. “You should go ahead and do it, before things get more awkward than they already are.”
I stared at him for a few minutes.
He raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Just think about it.”
“No! I’m not going to think about banging my business partner while we’re in the middle of the workday.”
“Then do it when you get home.”
If Jay hadn’t come back right then, I didn’t know what I would have done to Sam. My hands itched to wrap around his throat and throttle the fuck out of him. Jay put our lunch down on the table, glancing between us. “Did I, uh, miss something? You look a little homicidal.”
“I had to spend twenty minutes alone with Sam,” I responded. “Homicidal is putting it mildly.”
“He loves my company,” Sam said, wrapping his hand around the back of my neck. “Don’t lie.”
Jay and I both glared at him this time, and he removed his hand. “Fine, be that way,” Sam said, getting up. He grabbed his megaphone and one of the three containers of chicken as he stood up. “I’ll go,” he said, and flung his hand back. The megaphone slipped from his grasp and smashed into the mister. Something crunched, and then the misting fan fell off the edge of the RV and hit the ground, leaking the last of the water out onto the hard soil.
“Oops,” Sam said.
Neither Jay nor I even acknowledged him. At this point, I couldn’t be surprised when Sam fucked things up.
***
The second rush came around four that afternoon, as people headed to the store to get ingredients for whatever dinner they planned on making. I talked Jay out of putting the bee costume back on, at least until I had my father look at what Sam had broken. That didn’t help much, if I wanted to be honest. We spent so much time running around the tables that we didn’t have a chance to sit down and cool off.
During this rush, the food truck got almost no business. When shopping for dinner supplies, not many people wanted to stop and have a meal or eat jerky. A lot of people, however, cooked with honey. We hocked his goods for as long as we could, smiling and running around until our legs and cheeks both hurt.
When that rush ended, we immediately went into the dinner rush, which didn’t give us as much attention, but we still had plenty of people swinging by on their way to work, looking for a snack. Jay hocked my jerky like his life depended on it. Even Sam threw his all into it, which didn’t honestly say much, but I appreciated the effort just the same.
Things didn’t calm down until half past six, where the majority of people had finally settled in for dinner. Our tables were dead, while the food truck had people rushing them from all sides. I hated them now more than I ever had before.
And the heat had gotten unbearable. The first heat wave of the year had come through, and without the mister or the fan working on the RV, we had to endure almost three hours of running around in that heat without any relief. We’d been too busy to even send someone into the RV for a break.
Jay kept picking at his shirt, his mouth open as he tried to get air in.
“You okay?” I asked, starting to pack up for the night.
“Yeah,” he said, grabbing a bottle of water. Before I could stop him, he dumped the entire thing onto his head, soaking his hair and shirt in seconds. He jumped, surprised by this, and shook his head. He still didn’t look all there, so I grabbed him around the middle.
Before anyone could see what he had done, I hauled him into the RV and turned on the air-conditioner, so that it would get chilly. I dumped Jay onto the couch, where he immediately started to pull his shirt off. “It’s just so hot. Why is it so hot?”
“Because we live in Arizona and it’s almost June,” I told him. “If this is hot, how did you make it through summer for the last five years?”
Jay only made a humming sound, finally getting his shirt off and dropping it onto the ground. Well, that was the second time in two days that I’d seen him without a shirt on, which seemed like a lot. He looked nice without a shirt on, but after the way Sam had gone on about it, I didn’t want to look. It felt like inviting trouble.
I also didn’t have a choice but to look, because he started to undo the button on his pants. I grabbed him the by the wrists. “Whoa, there. Let’s not get carried away. Why don’t you cool it? We don’t want anyone to think something’s going on here where it shouldn’t be.”
“What?” Jay asked, still trying to undo his button.
I didn’t let him, pushing him back on the couch. “Why don’t you just sit down and relax. The air will kick on in a second, and then you’ll be fine.”
“I’ll be fine when you let me get my pants off,” Jay said.
“You need more water,” I decided. He’d only had a bottle and a half all day. He had to have been dehydrated. I let go of him only long enough to grab a bottle of our ice chest. He took the bitingly cold water and dumped it over his head, much like he had done with the bottle he’d had outside.
His eyes widened the second he did it, and he jumped up, shaking his head. Droplets of freezing cold water flew everywhere, including onto me. I had to admit, they didn’t feel awful.
“Um. Better?” I asked. “Not going to take your pants off anymore?”
“Did you screw it up?” Sam asked from the doorway. I didn’t think, just reacted, shoving him out of the RV with the flat of my hand and slamming the door in his face. “Ow,” he said from outside.
“Why don’t you finish packing up?” I demanded, then turned back to look at Jay, who still seemed kind of stunned. The water must have woken him up, because he pulled his shirt back on.
I tried not to feel too disappointed in that.
“Sorry,” Jay said, shoving his hands into his air.
“Nothing to apologize for,” I said. “I’ll see if my dad can fix the misting fan before tomorrow, and we’ll hopefully be okay then. We can destroy Sam’s megaphone to make sure that nothing like this happens again.”
Jay frowned. “We should take the cost out of his portion of the money.”
“If my dad can fix it, there’s nothing to pay for.”
“And?”
I laughed, slouching down on the couch next to him. “What were you thinking? Fifty bucks?”
“A hundred,” Jay said. “He barely sold anything, anyway. I sold more jerky than he did.”
I snorted. “A cat could sell more jerky than he can. But you have to admit, he’s good at attracting
a crowd.”
Jay grunted. I bumped my shoulder against his. “Ready to go pack up? We can see how well the food truck is doing now that the last of the dinner goers are gone.”
“They made more than us,” Jay said.
“Probably, but we aren’t charging ten dollars for a sandwich and another three dollars for a side and another two and a half for a drink,” I said. “It’s easy to make money when you gouge people like that.”
“Are you sure that I can’t slash their tires?” Jay asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Damn.”
Chapter Twenty
Jay
“Why won’t you just let me be nude?” I asked in the longest sigh of my life. Only a cruel man wouldn’t let another man lie naked out in front of their makeshift store.
Hamilton rolled his eyes at me. “Because being naked is only going to get you arrested. And probably a sunburn.”
I shook my can of sun block at him before going back to spraying my arms. “Covered. And I can talk the cops out of arresting me. All I have to do is run really fast.”
“How is that talking them out of it?”
I blinked, waiting a beat. “Did I ask for your opinion?”
I finished spraying all the parts of my skin that showed, and I tried to do the same for Hammy, but he wouldn’t have it. Something about the smell of the sun block bothered him. It made me think of being little and swimming in the tiny pool my parents had gotten for me and Beatrice. I wondered if Hamilton didn’t have memories like that.
“Let him at you,” Sam said from the steps of the RV. “You’ll burn.”
“I’m fine,” Hamilton said, his tone oddly snippy for the situation at hand.
“Do it,” Sam said. “You should take your shirt off though. So, ya know, Jay can get you like you ought to be got.”
I would have liked to choke Sam with the bottle of sun block, but there would have been witnesses. And while I pretended like I didn’t wonder if the two of them had slept together, I did the last of my sun protection. It didn’t matter if they’d done it anyway. It was none of my business, and that sort of thing would only matter if I had an interest in Hamilton, and felt horribly jealous and insecure about the fact that he hung out all day with a dude he used to screw. Possibly.
I focused my energy and hate on the people across the street. Frick and Frack pulled out all the stops today, debuting an all new sandwich, and at half price. It was some fish sandwich, made from humuhumunukunukuapua'a.
“I feel like it’s a little disrespectful at best to be serving the Hawaii state fish to celebrate your Hawaii themed truck of doom,” I said. “Also, douchey that they didn’t just call it a triggerfish.”
“But Jay,” Hamilton started, his voice flat, “how can they sound authentically Hawaiian if they don’t use the language?”
“Well, Hammy, they can start by going and fucking themselves.”
He choked on half a laugh. “Uh, I don’t think that would help.”
“It would help if they used a machete.”
Hamilton blinked. “You used to be so sweet. What happened to you?”
My eyes narrowed. “You happened to me,” I growled.
“I have a theory,” Sam said, popping up unwelcomed from the RV. “I think Jay always had a big ‘ol tiger in him. He’s just got an excuse to let it out now. This kind of salt doesn’t appear out of nowhere.”
But it did, because I couldn’t remember ever getting angry with people before this whole thing started. Now, I couldn’t go a day without some kind of freak out. Everything had gone to hell. These people across the street, the weather, the fact that I knew I couldn’t just sell honey for the rest of my life. I needed something else, and I didn’t know what that something else might have been. And finally, that I might have spent all my teen years on something that wouldn’t matter in the end. I’d missed out on everything, and I started to feel it.
I wasn’t in the mood to listen to Sam talking, so I went to change into the suit again. How I wished for the wintertime, because it was almost fun to dress up then. It felt like a prison sentence now, but at least it attracted people’s attention.
I lingered in the RV, again not wanting to see Sam and Hamilton being… anything together. This only made me glad I hadn’t tried dating in high school. If it meant being constantly insecure and sad, I hadn’t missed out on much. Who cared if I didn’t have anyone to talk to at night, or didn’t know what it felt like to be loved? At least I hadn’t had to deal with my heart getting beaten with a hammer every time someone smiled at the person I liked, and they smiled back.
After a bottle of water, I left the RV to get to work. I stood on the side of the road, dancing with a sign that advertised our sandwiches as well as the jerky and honey. My moves didn’t look all that great, so I tried to stick with silly, so people would think I’d done it on purpose. Sam filmed it on his phone, and I hoped to god he didn’t post it online for the world to see.
“Come fill your belly with our meat!” Sam shouted into the megaphone as he danced over to me. He did a lot more flailing than I did, spinning around me and gesturing to the sign in my hands. I might have been more annoyed if I hadn’t mostly been thinking about how hot it was, and how much harder it had become to breathe.
“We need a new catchphrase,” Hamilton said from behind us. “Maybe cool it on the ‘our meat’ stuff. I don’t know how tempting that is.”
Sam waggled his eyebrows. “My meat is the most tempting thing in the world, thanks.”
“Really? Because I feel like I’m doing a solid job of resisting,” Hamilton said.
“You have a stronger will than most.”
I just danced on, not wanting to think about meat. I remembered the good days, where I did nothing more than sit outside of my truck and sold jars of honey. It had been so simple back then. So much less stressful.
“Jay, you should take a seat over here for a while,” Sam decided, putting his hands on my shoulders and pulling me back. “Here, let my friend keep you company.”
“Why?”
He took my sign from me. “Because you need to sit down, and also, because Hamilton said he’d give you a backrub.”
“When did I say that?” Hamilton asked, cracking open a fresh bottle of water. I stared at it, watching the condensation hit his hand. I imagined how cold and lovely that felt.
The sun burned my eyes when I blinked. I felt it like it rubbed heat on my skin. Every movement stung, and my body moved differently, being this hot. I couldn’t breathe right.
“No, I have to keep going,” I said, reaching for the sign.
Sam pushed me again, setting me down in a lawn chair right next to Hamilton’s.
“Would you take that off, please?” Hamilton asked me, eyeing the suit. “You shouldn’t be in it at all. If you have to, then it should be for ten minutes at a time.”
I shook my head, my hair dripping with sweat. “I’m gonna get right back to it in a couple minutes anyway.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
But I had to. Even if it only sold a handful of products than we would have before, it got us that much closer to our goals. We had to offset the cost of having Sam anyway.
I panted, sitting back and feeling my body ache in protest. I probably sat in a pool of sweat in the suit, and I would have to pay to have it dry cleaned.
“Ham,” Sam said, turning with his stolen sign. He pointed at me. “Shouldn’t you be taking care of him? Start with cooling him down. Might I suggest you take your shirt off and dab his forehead with it?”
I didn’t have the energy to tell him that trying to clean the sweat off me with an already sweaty shirt didn’t sound exactly ideal. I laid there, still panting for breath. My chest felt heavy, but I wasn’t as tired as I thought I should have been. I didn’t move too much, my eyes locked onto nothing.
“I think not,” Hamilton said. “Tilt your head back and open your mouth, Jay.”
I had no idea what th
e hell he wanted, but I was too tired to do anything but obey. When I did, Hamilton tilted a bottle of cold water into my mouth. It rushed down my throat, giving me the loveliest relief that only lasted for a few seconds. I went back to slouching, staring at the sky like I hated it.
“The shirt would have worked better,” Sam said.
I closed my eyes, mentally counting down to when my break would be over. We would get into the lunch rush soon, so I would have to be up and alert for all of it if I didn’t want to leave most of the work to Hamilton. Maybe for that, I could leave the costume behind.
“We need more air conditioning.” I decided, my voice sounding thrashed. Even my tongue felt all dried out and almost useless. “Hey, I can sell my truck and use all the money to buy a pool to fill with ice. Then I can slip inside and drown.”
I felt a hand on my wing. “Jay, I really want you out of that costume.”
“Ooh, do you?” Sam asked.
Hamilton glared at him, no humor in his eyes. “He’s going to get sick. He needs to change back into his clothes.”
“No,” I said, pulling my arm away. “I have to get back to it. Just…” I stopped, trying to take a breath. “Just hand me a water, okay?”
He exhaled, doing as I asked. “Ten minutes, Jay. Ten minutes and you really need to change.”
I didn’t listen to him. I would be fine, because I was always fine when doing this. I’d dressed up in the costume on hotter days, and for much longer. I just needed water every now and then.
When I peered up again, I saw the line over at the food truck. It was only three people deep, which almost made me feel better. I could smell the fish sandwich from here and it did not entice me. I wondered if you were even supposed to eat humuhumunukunukuapua'a. It probably would get them shut down if they ended up killing a bunch of their customers.
I saw Helen with her arms crossed after leaving the truck. Her husband remained inside, flinging his disgusting sandwiches. It mostly looked like the pulled pork sandwiches, not the fish. Perhaps that explained why Helen looked so snippy.
