“I can’t do an IPA when it’s hot, dude. It’s a mental thing,” he said with a smile and passed Deion another bottle with a lime wedge tucked in the neck. “You gotta do like the locals do.”
“Speaking of being local,” Benji said, straightening slightly and biting his lip with what looked like nerves. He shot his boyfriend a look.
Deion tensed in his chair. What now?
With a frown and a shake of his head, Josh cut Benji off, doing that couple thing where two people communicated volumes without saying a word to each other. Deion refused to wonder what that was all about.
None of my business.
A weird, unwelcome tension lingered in the air afterward, though. And despite not feeling tired when he’d arrived, Deion crashed early, sacking out in the big bed in the tiny bedroom to the sounds of Josh and Benji cleaning up in the kitchen after they’d shooed him away when he’d tried to help.
The next day was South Beach time, mostly because Benji was dying to take them to the World Erotic Art Museum. Deion was pretty sure Benji’s goal was to get Josh all worked up so he could take him home and bang the shit out of him. And by pretty sure, he meant he’d overheard Benji saying exactly that to Josh. So, yeah. Deion expected those two to want to hustle home before too long.
But first, he was going to insist on taking his friends out to lunch at Joe’s Stone Crab. He’d specifically scheduled his visit in order to catch a meal at that restaurant before the stone crab season ended.
I mean, I came to see Josh. And Benji. But if a man can get a little stone crab too during a visit to see friends. . .
That man would be a dumbass not to.
He brought up his plans for lunch as they headed down the block to the museum’s double glass door entrance on the corner of 12th and Washington. Benji had a Groupon that covered their admission fees, so he’d cockblocked Deion’s instinct to pay. That was fine. He’d make up for it at lunch.
“Good thing you’re here now. Summer hours start next week,” Benji said, after doing a little dance at the idea of going to Joe’s for lunch. Apparently banging could wait. Benji explained at Deion’s look of confusion, “They don’t do lunch in the summer. Only dinner.”
“All I know is the stone crab season ends next week too, so we’re at the tail end of it.” He’d been getting a little antsy too. The ocean was one mysterious fucker. What if all the stone crab crawled away or something, and there weren’t any left at the tail end of the season? Who knew how this shit worked?
“Probably why they stop doing lunch,” Josh said, nodding like he knew what the fuck he was talking about, which was unlikely. Instead of a few years of an NFL salary in the bank, that boy had tuition due for the graduate degree in physical therapy he was about to complete, plus a bank loan for the business he and Benji had launched that year after Josh’s personal training clientele had grown large enough to pair with Benji’s massage and wellness clients. “Their main attraction isn’t on the menu again until when?”
“October,” Deion answered. He had his favorite restaurants memorized in every city he’d traveled to while in the NFL, and for Chicago, Las Vegas, and Miami, Joe’s Stone Crab topped the list. Highest of high-end steakhouses, plus amazing seafood and exquisite service? Couldn’t beat it. He set his calendar by the stone, king, and soft-shell crab seasons at Joe’s.
After a lifetime spent almost exclusively in the Midwest, he was a total whore for seafood, and half his Miami visit had been planned around the list of restaurants he wanted to hit.
“But, you know they don’t take reservations?” Benji said, raising a finger as if to pause everything. “The wait is horrendous, although at least we’d be there at lunch.”
“Taken care of,” Deion said. Satisfaction swelled in his voice. “The maître d’ is a football fan and I hooked him up with tickets the last time the Chiefs were in town. All I have to do is text him we’re coming and he’ll seat us right away.”
Benji threaded an arm through his and walked him to the door. “Then what are we waiting for? You can come visit anytime.”
“Sure. Erotic art for breakfast and stone crab for lunch,” Josh said, laughing. “Then we can do some people watching, or head over to Little Havana to pick up food for tonight.”
“What’s tonight?”
“Potluck and RWBY,” Benji said with relish, damn near licking his lips as if anticipating taking a serious bite out of someone.
“You guys don’t want to go out? Hit the dance floor?” He knew his friends were both working too hard to be major partiers, not to mention they were still establishing themselves with the clinic, so they probably weren’t ordering bottle service at the hottest clubs in the city. But he also knew they weren’t hermits. Josh in particular had went on a Twitter rant about how mad he was that he hadn’t gone to a gay bar until he was twenty-five, because he was having the best times he’d ever had in bars now that he was out and hanging with a queer crowd.
Not that Deion was thinking about going to gay bars in particular. Jesus. His brain needed to give the issue a fucking rest.
“Hottest salsa night is Saturday night at C Street,” Josh explained. “Worth it, even though the crowds are insane.”
“Getting sad in your old age, Grandpa,” Deion teased.
“That is so true,” Josh said mournfully, but he smiled too, as if he was having too much fun to care that he wasn’t running with the kind of crowd he would have hung with had he been drafted that last year in Minnesota.
Deion envied him.
While he was thinking of it, he shot a text to the host at Joe’s. Within minutes, his phone vibrated in his pocket and he dug it out again, expecting a simple thumbs-up.
“Hmmm.”
Benji’s head turned at Deion’s contemplative hum. “What’s up? Problem at the restaurant?”
“Nope,” he said, shaking his head and thinking. “He can get us in, although we might have to wait a few minutes in the bar until something opens up. But he offered me one better. One of their private dining rooms was booked for a lunch that just cancelled at the last minute.”
“Ooh, private dining. Like the high rollers do,” Benji teased.
“There’s a minimum, though.”
“Do we want to know?”
“It’s not bad, but unless we’re gonna start kicking it early with some very expensive wine, the three of us on our own are never gonna hit it.”
“No big deal. We can eat in the regular dining room. Hell, not having to wait two hours to get seated is a miracle as it is.”
But now that the idea had been raised as a possibility, Deion wasn’t inclined to let it go. The expense wasn’t a problem. He banked his earnings religiously, having always anticipated leaving the NFL early to save his brain, even if he’d stayed healthy. Splurging on a massive lunch spread for some of his best friends at the best restaurant in Miami, in his stone crab-obsessed opinion admittedly, was a pure pleasure. But getting charged for more food and drink than they could possibly eat?
That was a waste, and Deion’s mom didn’t raise him to waste a thing.
But if there were more than just the three of them. . .
“Think you can round up any of your friends?”
Benji gasped and bounced in his sparkly flip-flops. Swarovski crystals, no doubt. “Ooh! Really?”
“Hold on,” Josh said, dropping a hand on his boyfriend’s shoulder. “Let’s not go overboard here. How many people are we talking about and what’s the minimum we have to spend?”
Deion could see Josh doing math in his head, calculating how much he and Benji could afford to blow on this lunch. And probably trying to figure out who in their crowd would both be available and could drop a hundo on some midday fine dining. Deion had said he was taking them out to lunch, but Josh obviously considered that offer off the table, since they were now talking. . . “A grand. And I’m buying. So ideally, you’d round up about a dozen people. Is that impossible on a weekday?”
Spluttering, Josh tried to inte
rrupt him. “A thousand dollars? On lunch? You can’t—”
“Nah. Everyone we know is in the arts or a service industry,” Benji said, interrupting Josh in turn, quite cheerfully. His eyes had widened at the figure too, but his recovery period was speedy. “Nobody works nine to five, although you never know whose got shifts or clients. Bigger problem’s going to be that most of them party hard on Wednesdays before working all weekend. Half of them’ll still be sleeping in.”
“I’m gonna take him for a walk and calm him down,” Deion said to Benji, tipping his head toward Josh, who was still blustering with outrage. Benji’s phone was already in his hand. “You see who you can round up.”
“I’m on it,” Benji said, putting his phone to his ear as he turned his back on them and walked over to a quieter corner.
Talking Josh off the ledge took a good fifteen minutes. And Deion appreciated Josh for it, in a backhanded, pain-in-the-ass kind of way.
“Listen, man. Thank you. I know you don’t want to take advantage,” he said to his friend, shaking him by one shoulder. He’d made some late-night phone calls to Josh over the past couple of years, needing to touch base with someone who’d known him before he was in the NFL when the pushiness of newfound “friends” and even some fans got to him. “You know that’s one of the things I value about us. You got my back and I’m grateful.”
“Always.” Josh’s voice was gruff as he hauled Deion into a hug. And not a bro hug, with a fast pat on the back and a quick release. Josh hugged him like he was trying to tell Deion something. As if he wanted to force-feed Deion some kind of hardcore support, which thickened Deion’s throat until it ached. He wasn’t one for complaining, so this past year had required nonstop stoicism in the face of a what some feared was a career-ending injury, and as close as he was to his teammates, he’d missed having the kind of friends around where he could let his guard down.
“Love you for it.”
“I love you too, man.”
He thumped Josh on the back and let him go, shaking off the nostalgia. There was stone crab to be had! “But you gotta let me have some fun with all this bank, okay? I’m staying with you guys, your boyfriend feeds me like I just got off bread-and-water rations, and you guys are showing me around town. So let me do this thing, all right?”
“Okay,” Josh said with a smile. “You win.”
“Just brace yourself, because we’re gonna eat like fucking kings, man.”
Benji trotted over while they high-fived.
“Several people were shirty with me for calling before noon on a Thursday and waking them before they’d managed to sleep through their hangovers,” Benji announced as he rejoined them, sparkly flip-flops smacking against the tile floor. “But they got over it as soon as I mentioned the magic words: free lunch at Joe’s. They’ll be here ASAP.”
“What’s our final total, so I can let my man know?” he asked.
“I think eight people are going to join us, although two of them are littles”—Benji held out a hand waist-high, indicating children—“so I don’t know if that counts.”
“Beli and José?” Josh asked.
Benji nodded. “Are bringing the girls, yes. I figured this wasn’t exactly going to be a rowdy meal, so that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Nope. No problem. Just gonna eat and drink our asses off until they have to roll us out of there,” Deion said cheerfully. Whenever he made it back home, his extended family always got together with his siblings and cousins bringing their kids to every gathering. Having a passel of rug rats around always made him feel like he was with good people. “Bring on the kiddos. The more, the merrier.”
“You’re the best. You know that, right? The actual best,” Benji said, putting his arm through Deion’s as they headed for the museum entrance.
“Hey, I’m the one who came up with the sex museum idea,” Josh protested, catching up with them. “Just saying.”
“I know, baby. And I’m totally going to blow you for it later,” Benji said, blowing a kiss. “Just giving your bestie here a little love.”
Josh slung an arm around Deion’s shoulders. “He deserves it.”
3
Carlos hung up the phone and cursed like a sailor.
He didn’t know why the last-minute lunch invitation had thrown him off balance so hard. He knew it had something to do with the man taking them all out to lunch, though. Every time Benji or Josh mentioned Deion’s visit in a text or when he saw them, Carlos found himself playing it super cool, acting nonchalant and only barely interested.
On the inside, though, he got all butterflies and big smiles, which was weird because he didn’t even really know the guy. He’d only seen him once before at a party a long time ago, had barely spoken to him. And when Josh or Benji made one of their jokes about fixing Carlos up with some dude, to finally take what they speculated was the bi side he must have out for a spin, Carlos found himself blushing in a way he never did at their friendly teasing. Something about the idea of hooking up with a guy being mentioned in a conversation that included the ripped football player with the quiet smile and wicked sharp wit made him all kinds of mixed up.
Benji’s invitation to lunch at Joe’s in two hours shouldn’t have thrown Carlos into a tailspin like some kind of drama queen, but it definitely had.
A potluck dinner-slash-RWBY marathon was already on the calendar for tonight, so chill the fuck out, dude.
But the lecturing made zero impact as Carlos flung himself out of bed and into the showers, pausing to scoop up his phone off his dresser and dial the number for the salon.
“Hey, Dee, it’s me, Carlos. Any chance you can squeeze me in early today?”
Why he’d scheduled a haircut for this afternoon, bumping up his standing monthly appointment by a week, was another “mystery” that didn’t bear close examination. Nor did the fact that he’d gone out last weekend and bought a couple of new shirts and pairs of shorts when his closet certainly didn’t need the additions.
Hey, sometimes it’s nice to have new things. And I beat the shit out my clothes with this last run.
His most recent job had been with a local experimental theater who’d received enough grant money to put some permanent backstage people on staff and do a facility remodel. Carlos had made his pitch for the kind of creative set construction they could invest in to deliver dynamic environments in support of their actors, giving them examples from the brilliant work being done at Chicago Shakespeare Theater he’d seen in person during his college years and critical reviews he’d read of Arena Stage in DC. Making a special appeal for building a thrust stage was the core of his current pitch. He was a huge fan of the dynamic created by the performance space protruding into the audience and the participatory feeling of a production where actors entered and exited the stage using the aisles running through the audience.
He’d spent long enough doing straight construction for theaters in Miami to feel ready to make the push for more responsibility, even though he didn’t quite have the degree for it. But practical experience was still appreciated in the theater world, and Carlos had been working on sets across the local community for more than a decade now, since he was in high school and first got hired to wield a hammer backstage. The Miami Players Theater had given him a trial run with their most recent production, a modern-day version of Richard III, and he thought it had gone well. Set design had received special call-outs in the show’s reviews, which was awesome.
But he’d busted his ass to get his design in on time and under budget, and his clothes had paid the price. It wasn’t as if he wore anything fancy to work, but there was only so much wood stain, paint drips, and blood splashes from random cuts and popped blisters you could write off before you realized you really needed to stop wearing that Héctor Lavoe T-shirt in public.
The world’s fastest shower was followed by a sprint and groveling thanks to Dee for squeezing him in between two other clients. The entire time he was in her chair, he gnawed on the inside of
his cheek until she smacked him on the shoulder.
“Why are you so uptight?”
He couldn’t say. Truly. Because to say it out loud would sound crazy.
I’m about to go meet a man I think about way more than is healthy. And he doesn’t even know who the fuck I am. Also, he’s straight. Also, I sleep with girls. Life is too short to deal with unnecessary drama.
Because he was under no illusions. Ending up tagged in the same Twitter conversation now and again over the course of a couple of years didn’t mean jack shit. He doubted Deion even remembered talking to him the one time they’d bumped into each other during one of Deion’s past visits to Miami.
And unlike the big, handsome football player, Carlos wasn’t on TV on a regular basis, flashing a slick smile at the camera for . . . someone . . . whoever . . . to lust over.
Regardless, he was stupidly satisfied when Dee finished and his haircut was on point. He tipped her and paid, then caught a Lyft over to the restaurant, arriving in time to hear the host say they’d be taking the group to the private dining room shortly.
Carlos participated in the customary round of hugs and kisses, back slaps and “why haven’t you called me?”s, working his way through all of his friends. . .
And there he was, looming over everyone except Josh. Deion McCaskill.
“Hey, man,” he said, sticking his hand out and introducing himself. “Thanks for the invite. Carlos.”
“I remember. Thanks for coming,” Deion said, his massive hand engulfing Carlos’s own roughly callused one as he smiled. “Good to see you again.”
Heat snaked up Carlos’s arm from his palm to his shoulder, took root, and bloomed on his face.
Deion remembered him.
Carlos was trying to come up with something clever to say to continue the conversation, when all of a sudden Benji shouted behind him.
“Giant gold penis!”
“What?” he said, choking on a laugh. “That’s a non sequitur if I ever heard one.”
“Didn’t Benji tell you where he was taking Josh and me first?” Deion cocked an eyebrow and Carlos told himself that was not the sexiest facial expression he’d ever seen on a human being.
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