Covet Thy Neighbor

by L. A. Witt

  It wasn’t the logical and intellectual part of me that was terrified of getting involved with Darren, though. And that part was certain the only way I wasn’t getting hurt was if we just stayed friends. No matter how much I wanted him.

  Chapter Six

  WEDNESDAY WAS one of those days. Enough cancelations to put me in the red for the day. Malfunctioning equipment. A moody business partner.

  And to top it off, a pissed-off parent threatening to call the cops because I’d tattooed his sixteen-year-old son. Like it was my fault the kid had an absolutely bulletproof fake ID and looked like he was twenty-five. I was damned careful when it came to minors, but I wasn’t a fucking psychic.

  By the time I finished my last appointment at quarter past seven, I was done. Time for a beer, some mindless television, and an early night. Good thing I didn’t have much of a commute, or I’d have been a poster child for road rage.

  In fact, as I leaned into the open refrigerator, pondering what might accompany that much-needed cold one, it dawned on me that I was way too fucking wound up for a drink. Alcohol had a tendency to amplify moods like this, and I didn’t need that shit tonight. Not when my neck was already tightening up so bad I was half-tempted to ask Michael if he was game for a house call. Maybe he could have a beer and I could have some acupuncture.

  Quiet footsteps passed by my door out in the hall and tightened every already-tense muscle in my upper torso.

  A door opened. Closed.

  I swallowed.

  Darren was home. On the other side of this wall.

  I stared at that wall. Tried not to hear the echoes of the nights we’d spent on the other side of it. Or think about how much I’d kill for a rematch.

  Because we couldn’t do that. Better to stay just friends, I reminded myself. Just friends. I could totally handle that. Couldn’t really be much more than that, anyway. Deal-breakers and all of that shit. Even if he was witty. And hot. And intelligent. And fucking amazing in bed. And… and… fuck.

  Just friends. Just. Friends.

  Forget booze and acupuncture. After five days of avoiding Darren and going out of my mind because I didn’t want to avoid him, tonight was one of those nights when I needed something a little stronger.

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed my old gray parka and headed upstairs to the roof. The bricks were still damp from the recent rain, and the night smelled wet. Judging by the slightly pungent ozone in the air, there’d be more rain soon.

  Robyn and I had left some lawn chairs up here ages ago, and she’d fortunately had the foresight to cover them with a tarp. I pulled one out, made sure the seat wasn’t wet, and set it next to the concrete railing. Then I dragged over the plastic table, set it in front of me, and sat.

  As I reached into my coat pocket, I glanced at the door. Al didn’t give two shits about what I did when I came up here—he’d even joined me once or twice—as long as I didn’t do it in my apartment. The landlord before him would’ve evicted me in a heartbeat, though. It’d been three years since she’d sold the building to Al, and this was legal now anyway, but I still got paranoid. Old habits died hard.

  Once I was sure the old bat wouldn’t bust me, I pulled the plastic bag with the paper and the mint tin out of my jacket pocket. My mouth watered as I rolled the joint. Not for the taste of the smoke, but for the relaxation that would follow. I hadn’t been this wound up in I didn’t know how long, and the need for relief bordered on overwhelming. Desperate times….

  Once it was lit, I pursed my lips around the end of the joint and sucked in as much smoke as my lungs could handle, inhaling slowly so the burn in my throat wouldn’t make me cough. Holding my breath, I leaned back in my chair and rested my head against the railing. When the heat and tightness in my lungs just bordered on unpleasant, I exhaled as slowly as I’d inhaled. The smoke gathered in a thin gray cloud above my face. When it cleared, I brought the joint up and took another long drag.

  I hadn’t done this in, I didn’t know, a few weeks? Couple of months, maybe? A while, anyway. Long enough that it kicked in fast. I stayed as still as possible while my body floated and my head lightened. Enough? Finish the joint?

  Eh, what the hell.

  I took one more deep drag and set the half-smoked joint in the ashtray to smolder while I debated whether or not I was finished with it. Which I mostly was. But whatever.

  Closing my eyes, I just flew for a bit. One by one, every muscle in my body relaxed. The tension in my neck eased. The knots in my gut unwound.

  Embrace the apathy, Michael had once said when we’d been high as kites in high school.

  I wondered if he still smoked. Should invite him up here one of these days. And Jason too. Maybe Darren.

  Darren.

  Christ.

  A shiver worked its way through the haze of don’t give a fuck. My mind replayed a moment earlier this afternoon when I’d surreptitiously watched him walk past the shop. Head down, hands in his jacket pockets, he’d glanced in the window and smiled just long enough to do all kinds of things to my pulse. Even now, as I was lounging in a chair, three tokes to the wind, the memory alone was enough to have the same effect.

  Especially when it triggered more memories. The first time I’d seen him. That first kiss that had come out of nowhere.

  “I’m not normally so….”

  “Aggressive?”

  “Yeah. That. Not with someone I just met.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, I am.”

  The sex. Fuck, the sex.

  “In case you hadn’t gathered, I like tops.”

  I shivered again. So much for getting my mind off Darren.

  Getting high to get my mind off a minister. There was something almost poetic about that. Or maybe I was just high.

  I tugged at the front of my jeans to accommodate my hard-on. It occurred to me now that I probably should’ve taken into consideration the fact that weed didn’t just relieve stress: it made me horny as fuck. Usually not such a big deal. In fact, it was kind of the routine: smoke, relax, go back to my apartment, jerk off, kill a bag of Doritos, jerk off again, and then sleep like the dead for a few hours. When I woke up at noon, I’d be a new man. And I’d probably jerk off again.

  None of which did a goddamned thing to get my mind off that minister who had set up shop front and center in my brain. Instead of drifting off into the land of Don’t Give a Fuck, my mind turned into a nonstop porno, reliving every kiss and thrust. My nerve endings couldn’t quite tell the difference between reality and remembering, and erred on the side of making sure I felt the phantom brush of lips or scrape of teeth. My jeans were uncomfortably tight, and if I’d been in my apartment, I’d have resolved that problem by now. Weed up here on the roof, or jerking off down there in my apartment. Need for one outweighed the other. Though if this movie in my head kept going the way it was going, that balance would shift fairly soon.

  Door hinges creaked. I jumped as much as the weed would let me, and turned my head.

  “Hey, Al, it’s just—Darren?” I sat up, wondering why I suddenly felt like a kid who’d been busted misbehaving. Especially as I pulled my parka together across my lap. “Oh. I—” Crap.

  “Seth? Oh. It’s you.” He laughed. “Sorry. I, um, I smelled the smoke and just wanted to make sure some kids hadn’t come up here or something.”

  “Nope. Just me.” I cringed inwardly. “Surprise?”

  He laughed again. “Didn’t realize you were into that, but….” He shrugged.

  “Eh, I’m an artist and a musician.” My turn to shrug, and as I tried to get comfortable with my nerves and this goddamned erection, I added, “What do you expect?”

  Darren grinned. “Kind of a cliché, don’t you think?”

  “Very funny.” I gestured at the joint and smirked. “Care to join me?”

  I must have been stoned out of my goddamned mind. Completely fubar in the head. Because there was no way in hell the Reverend Darren Romero just strolled his fine ass
up to my little plastic table and picked up my lighter and that half-smoked joint. No fucking way.

  I swore I was getting higher just watching him. Not just the utter shock that he was smoking, but the sheer sexiness of it. The lighter’s flame reflecting on his face. His mouth around the joint. His long fingers holding it steady. The way his cheeks hollowed slightly as he pulled in the smoke. Holy fuck. So to speak.

  I’d been doing a piss-poor job of getting my mind off him as it was, and he hadn’t helped matters by showing up. Now he was taking a hit off the joint that had, so far, just made me hornier, an effect he wasn’t doing a damned thing to improve.

  Darren turned his head and blew the smoke out one side of his mouth. His eyes flicked toward me through the thin cloud. “What?”

  “Um. Well.” I laughed. “That’s definitely not a cliché.”

  He chuckled. “Not a sin last I checked either, so….” He took another drag.

  And I just stared at him, wondering what the fuck was in this weed that was making me hallucinate. It also occurred to me that he’d just taken a second deep hit and hadn’t coughed at all. His eyes weren’t even watering. Not much, anyway. Dude had some experience with this shit.

  Darren laughed. “Something wrong?”

  “Uh, well, no.” I cleared my throat. “I just didn’t think you’d actually take me up on the offer, and….” I trailed off, shaking my head, and it wasn’t the marijuana that had killed my ability to form a coherent thought.

  I’d left the tarp half draped over the chairs, and Darren took one out from under it. He set it a couple of feet from mine and took a seat. “You’ve got the wrong idea about me, Seth.” He crushed the remains of the joint in the ashtray. “I’m not a saint.”

  “Yeah, I’m… kind of starting to pick up on that.”

  He didn’t say anything, just closed his eyes for a moment, probably letting himself drift. After a while he said, “So you’re an artist and a musician.” He folded his hands across his lap, watching me with heavy-lidded, blissed-out eyes. “What kind of musician?”

  “Everything but the employed kind.”

  Darren laughed. “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’ve played jazz, grunge, symphonic… you name it, I’ve probably done it.”

  “What do you play?”

  “Bass guitar.” I sat a little deeper in my chair, getting comfortable. “Trumpet. Piano.”

  “You sing?”

  “If I want to clear out the house, yeah.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Worse. Trust me.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.” Darren shook his head. “I am absolutely not a singer.”

  “We should try out for one of those TV talent shows together,” I said. “Do a godawful duet and wind up on the Best of the Worst highlights video.”

  Darren laughed. “There’s an idea.”

  I just chuckled. “So how in the world did a straitlaced good ol’ boy like you wind up a pothead?”

  “I’m not a pothead,” he said with as much indignation as someone in his state could muster.

  “This isn’t your first joint, Reverend.”

  “No, it’s not. But I’m not a pothead.”

  “Fair enough. Neither am I.” I rested my head against the railing. “Okay, so how did you end up smoking pot?”

  Darren eyed me. “I grew up in Oklahoma, Seth. What else was I supposed to do?”

  My shoulder was unusually heavy when I lifted it in a shrug. “Cow-tipping?”

  Our eyes met. He snorted, and we both burst out laughing.

  “That doesn’t work, by the way,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Cow-tipping. Doesn’t work.”

  “Really? They do that on MythBusters or something?”

  “Dunno,” he said, his voice slightly slurred, “but it definitely doesn’t work.”

  “So you’ve tried it?”

  “Obviously.”

  “And? What happened?”

  “The first time, nothing happened.” He snickered. “The second time….” Trailing off, he shook his head and laughed. “Well, for starters, we were drunk.”

  “That couldn’t have ended well.”

  “No, definitely not.” He leaned back and gazed up at the night sky. “And we were drunk enough we apparently couldn’t tell the difference between a cow and a bull.”

  My jaw dropped. “No shit?”

  Chuckling, he nodded. “If you can imagine the running of the bulls, but with five idiots and one bull in a cow pasture.”

  “Oh Jesus. Anybody get hurt?”

  “Not seriously,” he said. “But I think it traumatized one of my friends.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Darren laughed, the sound edging toward that baked giggle that always followed a couple of tokes. “To this day, if you take him into a country bar with a mechanical bull, the poor boy breaks out in a sweat.”

  I burst out laughing, probably as much from the weed as the comment. “Really? A mechanical bull?”

  “Yep. Poor guy.” Darren could barely speak, he was laughing so hard. “He’s in for it when he inherits his dad’s cattle ranch.”

  We looked at each other and doubled over laughing.

  It was hard to say how long we spent up there. Weed and time did weird things to each other, so keeping track was difficult. But eventually, after sharing a second joint and telling random stories that were probably not nearly as funny as we both thought they were, we called it a night. I put the mint tin and lighter in my pocket, and we stacked the chairs under the tarp. Then we headed downstairs to our respective apartments.

  In the hallway, we stopped. Keys in hands, but not yet in doors.

  After almost a full minute, he broke the silence. “Well, thanks for the, um….”

  “Weed, Darren. It’s called weed.”

  He laughed. “Yes, I’m aware of that. Thank you.” He met my eyes, and I very nearly dropped my keys.

  We held each other’s gazes. My mind, of course, picked that moment to remind me of the first and second nights when a moment like this had led to a kiss that led us into his apartment.

  And Darren picked that moment, when I’d spaced out for a few seconds, to step closer, and then he had my attention, and he didn’t kiss me, and I didn’t kiss him, the kiss just fucking happened. Slow, lazy, downright sensual, and hot as hell, lighting up my nerve endings and bringing hundreds of goose bumps to life beneath my clothes.

  Through the haze came a single, jarring stroke of clarity: did weed have the same effect on him as it did me?

  And even if it didn’t have that effect on him, the fact was, it did have that effect on me. Which meant there was no way to know where the high ended and the legitimate desire for Darren began. Or if it even fucking mattered, because I wanted him whether I was high or not.

  And remember how weird it was after the first time? When there wasn’t weed involved?

  Wouldn’t be any better this time. Worse, in fact. One of us taking advantage of the other after the weed lowered our inhibitions. Though who was taking advantage of whom? Fuck if I knew.

  I pulled back. “We shouldn’t do this,” I whispered. “The… the weed. I don’t want….”

  Darren loosened his grasp on my jacket. “You’re probably right.”

  “I know I’m right, but goddamn it, I….” I leaned in again.

  “Me too,” he said, and didn’t resist at all when I kissed him. And about the time I convinced myself I should pull away, he ran his fingers through my hair, nails grazing my scalp, and I was a lost cause. I pushed him up against the wall. He gripped my hair and the back of my neck. Even over the lingering smoke, I could smell his all-too-familiar scent, and my mind went straight back to that first night. And the second one. The second one that had started when he’d given me a blow job right out here in the hallway. Fuck….

  You’re high, Seth. And so is he.

  Somehow I found the res
traint to push myself off him. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”

  Darren swept his tongue across his lips. “For what?”

  “We shouldn’t do this. Not after we’ve, um, been smoking.” We shouldn’t do this at all.

  He exhaled, his shoulders dropping a little. “You’re right.”

  I swallowed. “I should go.”

  “Yeah. I should… I….” He gestured at his door. “I should turn in for the night.”

  “Me too.”

  “Right. Good night, Seth.”

  I swallowed. “Good night. I’ll see you around.”

  He nodded, and we both turned toward our respective apartments. I unlocked my door and slipped out of the hallway before I could change my mind. His door opened and closed pretty quickly too.

  As soon as I was alone, I leaned against the door and rubbed my vaguely burning eyes. Had I really just turned down a night with Darren? When I was so goddamned horny I couldn’t see straight?

  But we had a hard enough time making postcoital eye contact when illicit substances weren’t involved. No point in making the awkwardness worse, since that was something I wouldn’t be able to relieve by frantically jerking off in the shower.

  Calling it off had been the right thing to do. I knew it was.

  But I still had a hard-on.

  Which I desperately needed to take care of.

  And I would.

  Right after I did something about this sudden hankering for Doritos.

  Chapter Seven

  SURPRISE, SURPRISE: it took less than twenty-four hours for us to run into each other again. This time Darren was pulling groceries out of his car while I closed up the shop.

  “Hey,” I said. “Long time, no see.”

  Darren chuckled. “Yeah, something like that.” He put the handles of another plastic bag over his wrist, grimacing as he did.

  “You need a hand with those?” I asked.

  He hesitated, then exhaled and set one of the bags down. “You don’t mind?”

  “Not at all. Give me a second.” I locked the studio door, then pocketed my keys and stepped off the curb. “Getting ready for Armageddon?”