HeartOn

by Amy Jo Cousins

  He could meditate in his wood shop at home building hand-carved bed frames and elaborate butler’s desks—he had a thing for cubby holes and tiny drawers—but a theater was where he lived. And if he could snag his first season-long contract as a set designer and not just a construction jockey, he’d be too busy to take on any more private commissions.

  He could hear his dad’s voice in his head right now. What’s wrong with working construction? And then picture his mother’s arched eyebrow as she reminded her husband that riding a desk as the CEO of one of Miami’s largest construction companies wasn’t the same as “working construction.” Sometimes he thought both his parents missed the days when his mom was hustling to sell a single painting and his dad was rehabbing apartment buildings and flipping the individual units as condos. But they were both too good at their jobs to have been anything except wildly successful in their own fields. He’d felt the twinge of pushing thirty and not figuring out his own path to success, but trusted his own process, slow though it was.

  “I’ll call her.”

  “Promise me.”

  She wouldn’t quit until he at least spoke to the woman.

  “I promise. Now, the wine? What can I get Benji and Josh that’s more than what I’d normally spend, but won’t kill me?” She knew his general cash-strapped state, since he’d refused all offers of family assistance except the introduction to a building owner who kept his rent reasonable in hopes of swaying Carlos’s mama’s generosity with the gallery discount, so he couldn’t go overboard here without giving a long explanation about why he was undercover-shopping for a millionaire sports star. And since his mom was scarily observant, Carlos was 90 percent sure she’d hear something in his voice he didn’t want her to if he talked about Deion, like, at all.

  “Darling, you can never go wrong with a cabernet, but your friend was always stealing sips of the sweet stuff.” Her art gallery parties were legendary for both their elegance and their wallet-emptying magic. Carlos and his friends had worked as servers in high school, when his mom’s eagle eye had allowed discreet tastes but no excess. “We served a delicious ice cider at the gallery opening you missed last week. It’s a dessert wine. He’d love it.”

  “Te quiero, Mom. I’ll call the Suarezes. Thank you. Tell Dad I say hi.”

  “And you’ll see him next weekend,” she said, reminding him, again, of the family gathering on the following Sunday.

  “And I’ll see him next weekend,” he parroted faithfully. Family parties were attend or die events. No joke.

  “Tell Benji we haven’t seen him in too long,” she added as they were ending the call. “Abuela says you should bring him with you next weekend.”

  And just like that, his heart was aching and full of love. His grandmother had never been able to reconcile Benji’s sexuality with her religious beliefs, and she coped with her disappointment in herself for that by always asking about Carlos’s best friend and inviting him to her table.

  This is why you don’t look at guys and think, “What if . . . ?” This is why you keep it simple. Because people try so hard, but you could still hurt them. And you don’t have to.

  But even as he thought the words, he was staring at expensive bottles of wine, trying to figure out the best choice to impress Deion with his thoughtfulness. To let Deion know Carlos understood about the importance of showing up with the right item to the potluck. To make Deion smile at him. And wondering just how far onto the flirtation end of the scales he was willing to climb before he scared himself.

  Farther than this.

  Thirty minutes of conversation with the wine shop owner later, Carlos left with two bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and stuffed in his backpack. A cabernet that sat comfortably within his price range for his own offering, and the ice cider his mother had recommended. Painfully more expensive, that one was.

  At Benji and Josh’s apartment, he greeted his friends and found Deion out on the balcony, taking in the view of the setting sun and the apartment complex’s residents hanging out in bunches around the pool.

  “Here,” he said, thrusting the slender, spendy bottle at Deion, blushing as if the time he’d spent obsessing over this purchase was stamped on his forehead in invisible ink. “Your wine. It’s a dessert thing Benji will like because it’s sweet. There’s a whole process. Cryo-concentration. Cryo-extraction. I could teach a class. Basically, it takes approximately a bazillion frozen apples to make, like, four tablespoons and it’s amazing. Per my mom.”

  “Thanks. That sounds really . . . complicated. But good. Thank you. Thank your mom. Do I owe you anything?” Deion asked, his massive hands dwarfing the bottle, clearly willing to pay him back.

  Carlos lied through his teeth. “Nope. Not a dime.”

  Benji slipped through the sliding glass doors from the living room, and Deion took advantage of the moment to grin and hand him the wine. “Thanks for letting me stay with you guys. I really appreciate it.”

  “Wow. This is a really nice bottle of wine. Thank you, you shit,” Benji said, giving Deion a smack on the biceps. “You know we didn’t want you pay for anything else today.”

  Deion narrowed his eyes at Carlos, clearly suspicious now that he’d been conned about the amount Carlos had spent on the wine.

  Yes. I lied. Get used to people doing nice things for you too, Carlos shot back with his own look while Benji turned to face him instead of Deion.

  “Your boyfriend will be here soon, by the way,” he said, with a teasing wink.

  “Just because I agreed one time when you asked me if I thought Tomás was hot doesn’t mean I’m into him,” he said mildly, not even looking at Deion but spotting his sudden head jerk at the words. “And you better watch yourself. You slip and say that kind of thing around my family, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  When he glanced at Deion, those dark eyes locked on his for a long, long moment before Deion tore his gaze away with an almost physical effort.

  “I gotta find a corkscrew,” Deion muttered, leaving the balcony.

  In. Ter. Esting. Verrrrry interesting.

  Carlos had picked up on an unexpected vibe earlier at Joe’s. A flirty, dirty kind of vibe. He was pretty good at recognizing when a guy was hitting on him—happened all the time, was mostly flattering, occasionally annoying, pretty much the same as it was with women—and Carlos had been almost entirely certain that Deion was doing exactly that with the whole shove-a-hand-in-his-pocket-and-linger thing.

  What he hadn’t been sure about was whether or not Deion knew he was doing it.

  But that head jerk at Carlos talking about finding a man attractive . . .

  That was interesting indeed.

  They never did get around to watching any RWBY episodes that night, although Josh did pull up some cool cosplay photos on his laptop in his ongoing campaign to convince people to come with him and Benji to the annual convention one year. No one was willing to commit to the trip yet, much less the group costuming, but arguing about who should cosplay which character was accidentally revealing fun.

  Carlos claimed the quiet, patient, occasionally reckless Ren and surprised himself by announcing that Deion would make an excellent General Ironwood. Something about the broad shoulders and sharp-dressed man vibe of the general was exactly right. Benji shot him a curious look at his proclamation, as if surprised Carlos had an opinion about Josh’s friend, who he was theoretically barely acquainted with.

  Whoops. He was going to have to work harder at concealing this growing crush he had for the big football player, or else Benji’s casual teasing about men Carlos found hot was going to hit a whole new level.

  * * *

  When Josh, Benji, and Deion arrived at the park the next afternoon, Carlos was already there, a brightly colored woven blanket spread out under the biggest of the shade trees ringing the field. Deion’s stomach unclenched at the sight of him, as if he’d been worried Josh and Benji’s magnetically good-looking friend wouldn’t show for the plans they’d all com
mitted to the previous night.

  “Claimed our spot,” Carlos called out, as he jogged up and took the cooler out of Deion’s arms. “Million Trees Miami is working on the next field over, but this one’s got some trees old enough to be worth sitting under.”

  The three locals gossiped about the time they’d volunteered with the group who Deion gathered had a goal of planting trees—one million of them, if he had to guess—to improve the green canopy cover in Miami.

  He wished them luck with that, grateful the heat wave in effect the day before seemed to have mellowed some. It was warm and sunny, but not painfully hot, especially not in the shade.

  After dumping their stuff under the trees, pausing long enough to text their friends a specific location, Josh set out to establish the field and goals for what he’d promised Deion would be a fiercely competitive soccer game, short stacks of small orange cones in both hands.

  “Carlos, Tomás says he hopes you’re wearing those short shorts you had on for Pride last year,” Benji called out from the edge of the field where he was looking to see if there were any open parking spaces nearby and reporting via phone to the friends who were still on the way. “No, I think you’re going to need to drop Axel off with your coolers and then go back to the main parking lot.”

  “They were only short shorts in Tomás’s imagination,” Carlos said, flipping Tomás the bird through Benji’s phone.

  “He says he knows you want him.”

  Eyes rolling so sarcastically Deion could hear it, Carlos shook his head. “He doesn’t need you encouraging him.”

  “Carlos says he wants you too,” Benji said into his phone, laughing and dodging when Carlos threw a spare blanket at him. After he ended the call, Josh lured him into kicking a soccer ball around the field, something Benji was surprisingly skilled at for a guy who claimed only to have gotten into sports when he started dating a jock.

  Deion hung back, staying closer to where Carlos was retying a loosened knot in his running shoe laces. “Benji can’t stop trying to set you up with that guy, huh?”

  Carlos snorted. “Right?”

  “It doesn’t get on your nerves?” he said, keeping it vague enough that Carlos could interpret the question as being about setups, even though what Deion really meant was, does it bother you that he keeps talking about setting you up with a guy?

  “I love those guys, you know? But they’re in that fucking honeymoon thing where they want everyone to be as happy as they are, and they think getting me on the man wagon is gonna do it.” Carlos shrugged, answering the question Deion had pretended not to ask. He spun the football up into the air with one hand, catching it and flipping it to Deion. “And I don’t want to shit on their happiness, but man, that is just some crap I do not need.”

  “What? Being bi?” he asked as he caught the ball, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth. Carlos locked gazes with him and Deion felt it in his fucking toes.

  Zing.

  “Yeah.”

  Say it? Don’t say it?

  Before he had time to think about it, Deion’s mouth opened and made the call for him. “Same.”

  Carlos quirked an eyebrow but didn’t say anything as Deion waited for that one word to explode like an IED in the middle of a dirt road.

  Nothing happened.

  Shouts echoed from the field where Benji was currently running circles around Josh, dribbling a soccer ball like it was attached to him on a leash. Carlos backed up a few steps, but only because his next gesture was a gimme beckon asking for the ball. Because he never didn’t know what to do with a football, Deion pulled his right arm back, turned his left shoulder forward, and sent a gentle spiral sailing right into his hands.

  Carlos threw it back and Deion returned it, both of them using about 10 percent effort because they’d stayed close enough to each other to talk without needing to shout, as if they weren’t quite done.

  Gray-green crab grass crunched under his feet as he shuffled them the tiny distances needed to angle up perfectly for each toss. For a city where it supposedly rained a lot, dust floated up from the dirt to coat his Adidas, and the spiky blades covering the football field were faded like old denim left too long in the sun. Every few minutes, a hot breeze carried the salty sea-wrack smell of the ocean from some unknown direction. It was all so far from the landlocked heat and greenness of a Minnesota summer, it felt like a land out of time.

  And maybe something about that was what pushed Deion to start speaking again, when it was clear Carlos wasn’t going to say anything further if he didn’t.

  “They don’t know.” He jerked his head in Josh and Benji’s direction. Benji was dribbling rings around Josh while the big guy chased him in circles and laughed and laughed.

  “Obviously.” Carlos smirked, and Deion thought about kissing a mouth twisted in a smile just like that. “You’re not getting half the ration of shit I am, and they only suspect with me.”

  After another minute passed, Carlos asked as he threw the ball, “Family?”

  “Nah.” Deion knew what he was asking. “My auntie and her girlfriend have been together since the nineties.”

  “Different for a guy, though.” Carlos waved off Deion’s throw and jogged over to their pile of shit, digging through Benji’s bag of can’t-leave-home-without-‘em supplies.

  With his back turned, it was easier to talk about it. “Yeah. Sure is. I mean, they’d deal. If nothing else, my mom’s not gonna put up with anybody giving her sister a pass and not her kid, but there’d definitely be a whole bunch of Christmases and Easters where everyone needed to talk it out before it was no big deal.”

  Carlos laughed and cracked the top on a bottle of lime-green Gatorade, chugging half of it before turning to offer the rest to Deion.

  No reason to think about his mouth on the bottle. But he couldn’t keep himself from seeing if he could taste where Carlos’s mouth had been.

  “Have you ever . . .?” He put the question out there, or the beginning of it at least.

  The quirk of Carlos’s eyebrow said he was totally capable of finishing that sentence. Super fucking convenient talking with a dude who knew exactly what you meant without having to say it out loud, especially when just saying have you ever made his dick wake up and take notice.

  Carlos shook his head no. “You?”

  Never. For years at a time, he hadn’t even let himself think of it. “I usually got a girl, although hell . . . half of them would probably love it.”

  “Player,” Carlos teased with a grin that woke something in Deion’s chest.

  His skin was hotter than the Miami sun could explain. He slammed the rest of the Gatorade and jogged over to the steel-drum garbage can at the edge of the field, hoping he’d manage to get his face under control before he turned around.

  “I think about it, though,” Carlos admitted long enough after they’d started tossing the ball around again that Deion thought they’d dropped the subject and moved on.

  He’d been beating himself up about chickening out of the conversation, even as the familiar bumps of the laces under his grip on the ball reminded him of exactly why this kind of talk was pointless. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, not like our friends would care.” Josh and Benji and the rest of them wouldn’t be anything but welcoming of that kind of news. Hell, Benji was already half trying to set Carlos up with their friend.

  “I know. Man, they’d probably want to throw me a fucking party.”

  Deion flinched. Carlos caught the look on his face and laughed.

  “Right? It’s almost worse.” He grimaced. “I mean, no, it’s not. They’re great, and I love ‘em. But, man, there would be weeks—months—of shit-giving after all these years of me only dating girls. Or, not shit-giving. But gossip? Hell yeah. Can you imagine?”

  “Yeah.” Because he’d done exactly that, imagined Josh and Benji’s reaction.

  “I thought about trying Grindr,” Carlos admitted. “But I’m pretty sure I hang
out or work with half the gay dudes in Miami. With my luck, I’d probably end up exchanging dick pics with Tomás and I’d never hear the end of that one.”

  Deion laughed to cover the weird mix of heat that flashed through him at the idea of Carlos’s dick pics and his growing dislike of this dude Tomás, who was probably a perfectly nice guy. “I hear you.”

  “Probably about a tenth the hassle a pro ballplayer busted on Grindr would get, amirite?” Carlos suggested with a knowing look.

  Jesus. The mere idea made him queasy. That inevitable outcome had kept him from ever having so much as a conversation like this one before now. He wasn’t sure why he was even discussing this with Carlos, although admittedly Carlos was doing most of the talking, but for the first time in Deion’s life, the risk seemed worth it.

  “Who needs it, right?” Carlos asked him with a quirky grin.

  Deion was two seconds from offering a high-five on that one when Josh and Benji returned to announce their friends were about to arrive and the serious setup work for the barbecue kicked into high gear.

  Some kind of spark was lit by their sideline conversation, though. Ideas Deion normally had no trouble suppressing crowded into his mind all day, in the middle of manning the grill during their cookout in the park—because he wasn’t about to eat Josh’s white-boy idea of what a barbecue looked like, boy could undercook anything—or in the late afternoon when he tumbled onto Josh and Benji’s couch after way too many beers.

  By five o’clock, everyone was sweaty and tired and slightly sunburned, but still game to extend their evening with the RWBY watch party they’d never gotten around to the night before.

  Carlos had given them shit for packing up before the sun went down, shaking his head mournfully at Josh and Benji. “White people, man. You guys crap out early. My people don’t leave a barbecue till the park district kicks us out.”

  “We’re just moving the party to another location,” Benji retorted, dropping a heavy cooler into Carlos’s waiting arms. “And giving everyone a chance to shower and sober up a little. Then it’s a RWBY marathon until we pass out.”