by Lisa Henry
Nick leaps up from his chair. “No problem, Mr. Grover! I’ll do it straight away!”
The Jacobsen Street site.
Jai Hazenbrook.
Nick’s lucky red cocksucking shirt.
Really, there’s only one way this can end.
Unemployment.
But also bow-chicka-bow-wow.
Nick races out of the office.
Jai is loading bricks into a wheelbarrow when he gets the feeling he’s being watched. He claps two bricks together, dust flying, and turns around, even though he knows exactly who it’s going to be. Jai’s not paranoid, but this happens at least once a day, and whenever else the kid from the office can find an excuse to visit the site.
And there he is now, ducking unconvincingly behind a porta-potty, his face as red as his shirt.
Jesus.
Just as Jai is turning away, willing to pretend he never saw the kid if the kid pretends never to have seen him, the kid reappears and waves awkwardly. “Hey.”
Jai slams a brick into the wheelbarrow. “Hey.”
The kid seems to take his answer as some sort of invitation, and comes closer. His red shirt pulls tight across his chest as he moves. He’s not as skinny as Jai first thought. He chews his bottom lip for a second before he speaks. “So, um, Jai, right?”
Jai brushes dust off his gloves. “Hard hat.”
The kid blinks at him. “What?”
“You need a hard hat if you’re coming on site,” Jai tells him.
“Oh!” The kid snorts. “For a second I thought you were, like, correcting me on your name or something, and I was going to say that Hardhat’s a pretty weird name. Kind of dumb, even for a nickname, right?”
Jai raises his eyebrows at the kid. “No, I was saying that you need a hard hat.”
“I’m not actually coming on site though,” the kid says. “I’m just standing here right at the edge of the site.”
Jai glances at the steel beams above them. “This is the site.”
“Is it?” the kid asks. “It feels more site adjacent.”
Jai rolls his eyes. “Get killed. See if I care.”
“Okay.” The kid tilts his head slightly and shrugs. “So, my name’s Nick.”
Jai knows. He’s never asked, but he knows because every other guy on the site makes fun of him because Nick has such an obvious crush on him. The guys are pretty good. They’re not total homophobes or anything, but if Nick were Nicole, they’d all be encouraging Jai to hit that, instead of snickering at the idea. They’re small-town guys with small-town attitudes, mostly. It is what it is.
“Listen, kid—”
“I’m eighteen,” Nick says. “And it’s Nick.”
“Okay,” Jai tells Nick. “And I’ve got work to do.”
Nick flushes. “Oh, yeah, sure.”
And yet he’s somehow managed to insinuate himself between Jai and the wheelbarrow.
Jai hooks his thumbs through his belt loops. “And I’d really like to get back to it?”
Which isn’t exactly the truth, but Jai wants out of the weird kid’s space. He’s here to work, not . . . whatever Nick is doing. Is it flirting? It’s hard to tell. The kid’s so awkward that a part of Jai wants to cringe in sympathy. The other part of him would really, really like to escape.
There’s always a part of Jai looking to escape. Escape this conversation, escape the grind, escape this small town. He spends his days lugging bricks and dreaming of the world outside Franklin, Ohio.
He’s got three months of summer to earn some money, and some blisters, and then he can spend the next nine months traveling. Argentina, this time. Living out of a backpack and seeing the world. Jai’s been doing it for years. It’s a hell of a lot better than staying in Franklin and working construction all year round. Or worse, becoming a corporate stooge. His mom says he’s afraid to settle down. Jai keeps telling her he’s just afraid to settle.
“Do you own leather pants?” Nick blurts.
“Excuse me?”
Nick freezes like a startled possum. Then his jaw starts working, but no words come out. His face is scarlet and his eyes are owlishly wide.
“Okay, I’m gonna get back to work now.” And pretend this never fucking happened. Leather pants? What the hell?
He moves to step around Nick, and is surprised when Nick reaches out and grabs him. Long, thin fingers curl around his forearm.
“Wait! That was weird. Sorry, that was weird. I’m weird. So, um, if you can forget that thing I said about leather pants, that would be awesome.” Nick’s face is scrunched up, like a toddler refusing vegetables. “But, okay, I’m seriously wearing my favorite red shirt and I would really, really like to suck your dick.”
For a moment Jai only hears a strange buzzing in his head. It takes a little while for him to actually parse the words. Because on what otherwise ordinary Monday morning does anyone hear words like that? On what otherwise ordinary Monday morning does anyone say words like that?
Nick uncurls his fingers from Jai’s arm. He looks at Jai hopefully, and shrugs and flashes him a quick grin. “If, um, if that’s something you’d be into?”
For three months a year Jai works hard and saves his money. Goes to bed early and gets up before dawn.
For nine months a year he escapes. He goes bungee jumping and cliff diving and a hundred other crazy things his mother doesn’t want to hear about.
These two worlds do not collide.
Until right now.
“Yeah,” he hears himself saying, his gaze fixed on Nick’s mouth. “I’d be into that.”
The porta-potty smells of chemicals and urine. It’s hot, and there’s not much room. Jai finds himself wedged into the tiny space beside the toilet, while Nick pulls the door shut behind them. Then Nick gets down on his knees.
“Oh, gross!”
“What?” Jai asks. He can’t see the floor.
“I think I’m kneeling in pee.”
Still, that doesn’t seem to dampen Nick’s enthusiasm at all, because a second later he’s tugging at the fly of Jai’s jeans, wrenching at the zipper. Jai’s tool belt, slung low around his hips, gets in the way. Jai tries to unfasten it, and only succeeds in smacking Nick in the head.
“Ouch.”
“Fuck. Sorry.”
Nick rubs his head and grins up at him. “It’s all good.”
Jai hitches his tool belt up, and Nick attacks his fly again. This time he gets the zipper down and shoves his hand straight into Jai’s open jeans. Jai’s hard already—not fully—but he’s getting there fast, and the gasp that Nick gives sounds a lot like one of appreciation. Then Nick’s peeling Jai’s underwear down, licking his lips, and diving right on in.
“Shit.” Jai’s head falls back and knocks against the wall with a hollow thunk. It doesn’t hurt. Jai thinks he probably wouldn’t feel it even if it did. He looks down at Nick, at the dark head shoved into his groin, at the red shirt pulled tight across angular shoulders. He keeps one hand on his tool belt so he doesn’t brain Nick again, and rests the other one against Nick’s head. Nick’s hair is long enough for him to curl his fingers through, and a little crisp with gel.
Nick sucks and licks his way up the length of Jai’s dick.
It’s wet, and messy, and Jai doesn’t know whether to just go with it or push Nick away because he feels like an overenthusiastic Labrador. He tugs Nick’s head back gently.
“Have you done this before?”
“Yes!” Nick says, breathing heavily. “Kind of? I’ve watched a lot of porn. Like a lot.”
So that’s actually a no.
Jai is going to hell, for real.
“Also,” Nick says, “I’ve practiced on stuff. Last week I almost choked on a cucumber.”
How is this kid even real? Real people have filters.
“A cucumber?”
Nick’s eyes widen. “Have you seen those clips on YouTube where people try and make their cats scared of cucumbers?” He screws up his face again. “Sorry. Not
relevant. I’ll just, um . . .” He leans forward and closes his mouth around the head of Jai’s dick.
A part of Jai would really like to ask Nick exactly what planet he’s from, but it’s hard to concentrate while getting his dick sucked. He moans and drops his head back against the wall again.
Nick runs his tongue under the head of Jai’s cock, and Jai goes weak at the knees. “Yeah,” he says, tightening his grip in Nick’s hair. “Yeah, right there.”
Nick gives a pleased little hum and does it again.
Jai closes his eyes. It’s hot inside the porta-potty. A bead of sweat trickles down his spine. Jai shudders and forces himself not to try to thrust farther into the kid’s mouth. Nick wraps his warm fingers around the shaft of Jai’s dick and mouths eagerly at the rest of it. He swirls his tongue around the head, then leans forward to take more in and sucks.
“Shit.” Jai gasps and twists his fingers in Nick’s hair.
He’s close. It’s been a while since he’s done this. Last time . . . When was the last time? Yeah, that’s right. It was with Gemma. Cute girl from Scotland. A shared dorm room in a hostel in Hanoi, and a shared bottle of Sơn Tinh. She’d blown him, and he’d gone down on her until his mouth and tongue were numb. But a lot of that had been the Sơn Tinh. It’d taken ages for her to come. The next day they’d shared a shower and gone their separate ways. Ships passing in the night and all that.
Nick pulls off him with a pop to suck in a lungful of air. His face is red. “’S’okay?”
“Yeah.” Jai resists the urge to shove his face straight back down. “I’m getting close.”
Nick grins. “Cool.”
He dives in again.
This time Nick’s more confident. He digs his tongue into the slit, almost driving Jai up onto his toes. Nick makes a small, happy sound and sucks again, which is all it really takes for Jai to start coming.
That’s when things happen fast.
Jai’s still coming when he hears the sudden bang of a fist on the door.
Nick pulls back with a surprised noise, and gets a face full of cum.
“Shit. Shit. I’m sorry!” Jai hisses, and in the same moment realizes that the crack of light around the edge of the porta-potty door is suddenly getting bigger. A lot bigger. “Fuck. Did you lock the—”
The look on his foreman’s face as he wrenches open the door and catches them is one that will probably haunt Jai forever.
It takes thirty seconds for Jai to lose the job he really needs.
He’s so eager to get the hell off the site that he leaves his lunch pail there. He’s halfway home before he remembers it, but fuck it. He’s not going back.
He didn’t even bother to try to argue with the foreman. Just walked off the site, leaving Nick sitting on the sidewalk while the foreman called Mr. Grover. Nick looked pale and sick, like a kid sitting outside the principal's office. Jai was worried enough to stop for a moment, and Nick looked up and shot him a wry grin, and shrugged in the universal gesture for what-can-you-do. Well, you could not offer to blow random guys on your boss’s dime. Not that Jai isn’t shouldering his share of the blame. He didn’t have to say yes.
So he left.
Walked down the street to where he’d left his bike, started it up, and ignored the rattling sound that he thinks is the cam chain. He doesn’t have the money to get it fixed at the moment, and, oh yeah, now he’s also unemployed.
Fuck.
Jai rides out of town, taking the back roads, because the idea of heading home to an empty house is not one that appeals. Nothing in Franklin appeals. It’s why he was so eager to get the hell out straight after high school, and why he only comes back for three months a year. It’s home, but it’s too small-town. Whenever he’s back, he’s itching to be gone again. A part of him wants to get on the interstate and just keep riding until he hits somewhere new.
Instead, he turns around and heads back into town. He goes to the river and parks up by the entrance to the trail. It’s not quite 10 a.m., too late for most morning walkers or cyclists, so there aren’t too many people about. He watches the river for a moment and almost wishes he had his lunch pail with him. He’s unemployed. May as well enjoy a fucking picnic.
He walks down to the riverbank and thinks about all the time he spent here when he was a kid. His dad loved the river. He used to come here every morning and cycle miles along the trail. A man as fit as that shouldn’t have died of a heart attack at forty-one.
Life is short, right?
Why would anyone settle for anything less than living life to the fullest, when tomorrow they may be dead? Yet, wherever he goes in the world, he sees people stuck in the daily grind.
He sits down under a tree.
He feels out of place here, and more so than usual. He’s still wearing his damned tool belt. He leans back and unfastens it and lays it on the ground beside him. Wipes his hands on his jeans and thinks of Nick going down on him. His enthusiasm, and his grin, and the way he sucked harder when Jai started to come.
His dick twitches, like it hasn’t already seen enough action today.
Farther down the riverbank, a man’s throwing a stick into the water for his dog. The dog leaps from the bank and lands in the river with a splash, already paddling.
Jai starts to laugh, and he’s not even sure why.
Crazy day.
Crazy kid.
Crazy fucking world.
Mostly, he thinks, he’s laughing because he’s going to have to explain to his mom why he just got fired.
Chris Stahlnecker is not a bad guy. As far as dads go, he’s pretty good. He’s not an asshole or anything, he’s just a little bit distant. And not distant in the way that leaves Nick with complex abandonment issues and a pathological fear of rejection, like Shinji in Neon Genesis Evangelion, just that Chris and Nick don’t really have much in common. Sometimes Nick thinks his dad isn’t a dad so much as he’s an acquaintance Nick’s been rooming with for the past eighteen years. Apart from the occasional “straighten up and fly right” lecture—lectures that Nick politely listens to and then completely disregards—his dad may as well be a stranger.
Right now, Nick is betting he wishes he were.
If it was about anyone else, Nick would have loved to hear Harvey Grover explain over the phone to his dad why Nick was no longer employed at Grover Construction. Because how hilarious would that be? Except it turns out it isn’t funny as much as excruciatingly embarrassing. Because there is a huge, huge gap between Chris Stahlnecker being okay about the fact that Nick is gay, and having Harvey Grover hit him with a visual he doesn’t need. There is no way Chris wants his face rubbed in it.
Rubbing his face in things is Nick’s specialty.
“He . . . he what? Oh my God. Oh. Oh my God.” With every passing second, Chris’s face grows whiter. And he was already pretty white to start with. “Thank you, Harvey. Of course I understand. Good-bye.”
“What?” Nick’s mom asks. “What’s going on?”
Nick’s parents have him trapped in the kitchen, and Nick is a little bit worried that if he attempts to leave, one of them will rip his face off.
Nick sits slumped at the kitchen table while his dad leans on the counter and stares at him. Chris looks a little manic. One eye bulges more than is probably medically advisable. One hand claws at the knot of his tie like he’s afraid it’s trying to strangle him. His other hand still clutches his phone.
“What?” his mom asks again.
“Nick got sacked,” his dad says.
Right in the eye, Nick wants to tell him, but no. No, Nick.
“Do you want to tell your mother what happened, or shall I?”
“Um,” Nick says, and wonders if neither is an option. It’s probably not. And he really, really doesn’t want to say this, but he really, really doesn’t want to make his dad do it either. “I kind of got caught doing stuff with a guy? In a porta-potty?”
“Stuff?” his mom asks.
Chris flinches. So does Nick.
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“Um, giving a BJ?” Nick says, and, speaking of BJs, he prays to Baby Jesus that his mom knows what it stands for and he doesn’t have to explain. Knows only because she’s read it in a book, not because she’s ever . . . Oh God. What is wrong with his brain today?
“Oh,” his mom says and blinks slowly. “Oh!”
And then nobody says anything at all.
Nick wrinkles his nose and stares at a speck of congealed ketchup on the table.
The clock on the wall ticks.
The dog waddles into the kitchen, takes one look at the humans, and skedaddles again.
The clock on the wall continues to tick.
“Um,” Nick says at last.
His dad’s eye spasms.
“No,” his mother says brightly, crossing to the refrigerator and rattling around in it, as in No, I will not let these clouds spoil my picnic. No, I will not admit the glass is half-empty. And no, my precious little angel was not just caught performing fellatio in a porta-potty. “No, nobody is going to turn this into a thing. This is not a thing.”
Nick’s eyes widen as she reappears from behind the cover of the refrigerator door, clutching a wine cooler. She twists the cap off the bottle aggressively and takes a swig. His mom is day drinking. He’s broken her.
“It was an accident?” Nick attempts.
“An accident?” Chris huffs out. “An accident? You accidentally gave someone a blowjob?”
If Nick never hears the word “blowjob” come out of his dad’s mouth again, he’ll die a happy man.
“Um,” he says, because, really, what else can he possibly say? “Sorry?”
His dad’s face turns a startling shade of red. “Go to your room, Nick.”
Nick bolts.
Nick: I got fired.
Devon: SERIOUSLY?!?!?!?! :-o
Nick: I feel bad.
Devon: ??
Nick: He got fired too.
Devon: Dude.
Nick: IKR?
