Fall through Spring

by Amy Lane

  “Yeah,” Carpenter agreed, nodding. “It’s a little early for that. What is your brother thinking?”

  Dane shrugged. “Probably that he’s going to get his heart slaughtered. Man, that kid….”

  Carpenter sighed and took the flour from him, then measured out six cups of it for the bowl, and at least another cup for flouring the counter… and covering the two of them. The man was definitely not neat! Dane used to think you could just make cookies and that was a thing that would end, but cleaning up this kitchen was going to be an act of divine devotion.

  “Jefferson’s… he’s a good kid,” Carpenter said after a moment of coughing as they attempted not to coat the insides of their lungs with glue. “It’s… I’m just not sure what a great boyfriend he’ll be. He needs training up.”

  “That’s awesome,” Dane muttered, getting the eggs. “Because my brother is the best at picking them, right?”

  “I don’t know—how bad was his last boyfriend?”

  Dane grunted in disgust. “Well, we came to Sacramento because his last boyfriend was sleeping with his last boss. Because that’s just the kind of douchebag who likes to make my brother feel like he’s the defective one.” God, Dane couldn’t get over the losers Mason had dated. At least Dane’s losers had been of the solid “You don’t need a psych eval, baby, if you just smoke another bowl with me!” variety. Drug abusing scumbags were one thing, because they didn’t assume they were better than you.

  Carpenter snorted. “Poor guy. No wonder he was so nutted up the first time he talked to Skip. All that earnestness just dripping off of Skipper—probably worked like an aphrodisiac.”

  Dane rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and not just to Mace. You do know half your soccer team has a crush on him, right? It’s a wonder you don’t.”

  He admitted freely to himself that he was laying out a little bait, seeing if he got a nibble.

  He didn’t expect Carpenter to swallow the hook.

  Clay stopped cracking eggs into the cookie batter and cocked his head, flour-dusted eyelashes moving slowly as he blinked.

  They stood close so Dane could hand him ingredients, and as the mixer whirred on the counter between them, Dane could swear he heard Clay’s indrawn breath.

  “Skipper’s not my type,” Clay said, a wistful smile on his face. “I was never a sucker for blonds.”

  Dane couldn’t help it—his slowest, flirtiest smile started at his toes. The smile he’d used to seduce his first crush in the tenth grade, the smile he’d used to coax his college boyfriends into threesomes when his manic phases grew into a sexual skin hunger that made him want to scream—that was the level of wattage he was aiming at Clay Carpenter. And for the first time in his life, he sweated getting anything back. Oh God oh please oh God oh please oh please oh please….

  Carpenter arched an eyebrow like he knew exactly what Dane was doing, and he reached out to turn off the mixer, which was probably a good idea.

  “Do you really think you’re the first guy to try to seduce me over chocolate chip cookies?” he asked playfully. “I know what happens next.”

  Dane’s mouth went dry. “What happens next?” he begged.

  “We have an amazing kiss,” Clay said—and his expression went sad. “And then you never talk to me again, and I’m left alone and confused.” He took a step back and turned on the mixer, shrugging. “That would be super depressing. I’d really rather keep seeing you.”

  “True story?” Dane asked, little chips of his heart flaking into powder.

  “True story,” Carpenter confirmed. He smiled nostalgically. “The cookies were tremendous, however. I think of kisses with stubble and breathlessness whenever I eat them.”

  Dane’s mouth fell open a little, and he thought of all the time Carpenter talked about chocolate chip cookies. He’d said he wasn’t gay—but he hadn’t said he wasn’t bi.

  Which meant he very well could be.

  And all this time he’d been craving cookies, what he’d really been craving was a Dane in his life who wouldn’t leave him sad and alone.

  Dane took in a breath to tell him this, when from upstairs there came a furious pounding sound—like a bed might make as it bounced against the wall as somebody was getting fucked senseless.

  The conversation they were having with their eyes changed from yearning to horror in an instant.

  Clay took a step backward and looked around. “Vanilla?” he said, although they’d already added it.

  “Sugar?” Dane echoed—also in the mix.

  “Lemon extract,” Carpenter said, blowing Dane’s mind, because while it was on the counter, it wasn’t in the recipe.

  “Sure,” Dane told him.

  “Almond extract too.”

  “Why not.”

  They threw both ingredients into what had been shaping up to be a perfectly normal batch of chocolate chip cookies, as well as what was probably one too many eggs.

  And—oh shit!—they’d added the eggs after the flour, and now they needed butter, so that was probably wrong too.

  It didn’t matter.

  They just kept throwing shit into the cookie batter until they got to the chocolate chips, which—thank God—made the mixer louder, as it beat the resulting mixture until it was good and dead. Or blended. Whatever.

  When they shut off the mixer to spoon the cookies onto the greased cookie sheets, the sounds overhead were done and the moment was broken. By the time Mason and Terry Jefferson—who looked no less ragged-urchin street-waif than he had the first time Dane had seen him—wandered out, they were bantering like they always did, and that horrifying moment of realizing Dane’s brother was getting happily laid was far behind them.

  They chatted for about a heartbeat before Jefferson practically bolted out the door and Mason followed to give him a ride to his car. Then it took another fifteen minutes to clean the kitchen.

  As they sagged into chairs at the breakfast nook in relief, Clay said the obvious thing.

  “You’d think knowing what they were doing would have made me horny,” he said. “But it just sort of made me sad. I mean, yeah, part of me’s got the chubby going on, but the rest of me is wondering what it must be like to commit to love that fast.”

  Dane swallowed, not sure whether to apply that sentence to his growing feelings toward Clay or his concern over Mason.

  He picked Mason because Clay was too new, too much a hope for the moment.

  “You think it’s love?” he asked. “Already?”

  Clay raised that playful eyebrow, and Dane wanted to smooth it over with his finger. “Did you see the way Mason looked when he handed that kid cookies? And Jefferson’s practically feral. I expected him to arch his back and dance sideways when he realized we were both down here. It’s like feeding a stray cat. Sometimes that cat comes in and becomes the family pet. Then other times, it bites a chunk out of your thumb and runs off to get hit by a car. I am not sure which way this one’s gonna swing, Dane.”

  Dane groaned. “I can’t…. Do you know how much he wants to find Mr. Right? Do you have any idea? He’s wanted to be married since he was in eighth grade!” He remembered his mother’s fondness for a picture his brother had drawn in middle school. “A husband, a house, and a cat.” He grunted. “Why don’t we have a cat? I think that’s wrong.”

  Clay tilted his head. “Because in two weeks, you’re going to be gone for fourteen hours a day, four days a week, and ten hours a day the other two. You showed me your damned trimester schedule, Dane. You’re being responsible here. Don’t fuck that up.”

  Dane buried his face in his hands. Really? He had to be falling for the one guy in the world who saw him as someone who wouldn’t fuck it up? Where did Clay get that impression? More importantly, did Dane really want him to keep it? Wasn’t it easier if he abdicated all responsibility for his actions by playing the Dane’s Flaky card until it disintegrated? “Will you get a cat?” he begged, and Clay sighed.

  “It’s a distinct possibility, but I’m waiti
ng for your summer break so you can show me how to deal with it. If I adopted a cat and accidentally killed it by not knowing the secret cat-word, my life would be effectively over.”

  Dane looked over his hands and rolled his eyes at the dumbass. “There is no secret cat-word,” he muttered. Great. Carpenter was playing the Carpenter’s Stupid card, which apparently canceled out the Dane’s Flaky card. Now he knew.

  “Yeah, that’s what all cat people say. I’m not taking your word for it. It’s like these cookies.” He took a blissful bite out of the one he’d been waiting to cool down. “Mm. The lemon and almond actually really make this. Anyway, I was good—I ate carrots and chicken and whole grains and protein all week, and this cookie is my reward. You keep your meds steady and take care of yourself all trimester, and I’ll get us a cat.”

  Dane’s heart, which had been steadily sinking under Carpenter’s solid logic that no sane person would dispute, suddenly perked up.

  “Us?” he asked, the memory of that frozen moment in the kitchen resurfacing, Clay’s confession that he’d once kissed a boy over chocolate chip cookies and that he’d ended up confused and alone resonating in Dane’s heart like a perfect chord in a tuning fork.

  “Yes, us,” Clay said, taking another bite. “This will be a co-owned cat.” He looked at Dane solemnly. “Which means you and I will need to be friends for a good long time.”

  And Dane got his meaning then.

  Friends. They had to be friends. Not just lovers—or even lovers. Clay Carpenter valued Dane’s friendship over Dane’s body.

  And that was sort of a first. Dane had enjoyed having all the sex, as much of the sex as he could possibly manage, plenty of sex and scads of sex. Dane was the bomb at putting out.

  But between his self-esteem death spirals and his frighteningly manic upswings, keeping a lover as a friend hadn’t been something he’d done much. He had to admit, part of the reason he wasn’t off at this very moment with another student from the veterinary science program was that he didn’t want to see what happened to that friendship if they caught Dane having a panic attack in his car like Carpenter had.

  It was just so much easier to hook up a few times and then drift apart so that person never got to see you at your worst.

  But Carpenter had seen him doing that—and he’d stayed. Was Dane really ready to risk alienating him as a lover when he was such an outstanding friend? But look at him—solid, scruffy, his brown eyes the kindest things Dane had ever seen. Dane wanted to touch all that kindness, thinking it might feed him, soothe his own bitchiness, or at least dilute the solid core of it that existed in Dane’s frequently confused heart.

  And he also wanted to run his mouth over the back of Clay’s ear.

  “Sure,” he said casually, eating half a cookie and leaving the other half for Carpenter to finish off. “We’ll be friends forever.” He swallowed the cookie and then smiled slyly. “That can mean so very many things.”

  Clay merely blinked, slowly and—had he known it—catlike.

  “It can,” he agreed. “Let’s make sure the things it does mean are… healthy.”

  “Indulgences can be healthy,” Dane said blithely, taking a swig of milk.

  “But they also have to be earned,” Clay responded. He met Dane’s eyes with a steady understanding that told Dane he was fooling nobody.

  But that was fine. He didn’t need to fool a soul. He figured it would be good, in this case, if Clay Carpenter knew exactly what he was getting himself into.

  Breakfast Bar Love

  “SURE,” CARPENTER said, his hopes for the weekend crashing. “Yeah, Sabrina, I’d love to watch the kids.”

  “Are you sure?” his sister begged, sounding exhausted. “I know it’s a big deal—”

  Well, it was, sort of. The week before, Mason had sprained his ankle playing defense, going down like a tall tree in a forest of surprised younger players. Poor guy—his ankle had looked horrible, and the memory of Terry Jefferson running to his rescue in a battered Toyota would stick with the entire team for a long time.

  Mason was definitely a Lexus man. Jefferson’d had no idea how outclassed he was, both as a boyfriend and as a knight in shining armor.

  But Mason was out for the next few games, which was too bad because he’d actually been visibly improving as the game went on—right up until he’d poked a clump of grass with his toe and rolled his ankle. Anyway, they were short on defenders, which left Clay as a sorely needed relief man, and for the first time in his life, his sister needed help.

  She’d driven up from the Bay Area at the beginning of the week because the kids had an inexplicable week off school. She couldn’t explain it either. Yeah, she called it President’s Week, but it sounded like a scam to Clay. Anyway, she’d been planning to spend the time shopping and doing “very important educational things” with her spawn, but first Clay’s mom had gotten sick, and then Sabrina—who swore she had the constitution of an iron-sided ship—had come down with the flu.

  The kids had been vaccinated—they seemed to be getting off Scot-free, but Sabrina had nobody to take them that weekend.

  Except her baby brother, who had yet to pony up for the family.

  “You can get out of work today?” she begged pitifully. “It’s not a problem?”

  Clay sighed. Unlike Skipper, who would rather die—quite literally—than miss work, Clay didn’t mind calling in sick. “No. Not at all. They can crash on the hide-a-bed in my apartment. Do you think they’d mind going to a gamer party? I swear, it’s just guys logging into their PS4s and overloading Skipper’s internet.” Dane was going to be there, and this had been a very big deal for Clay because, well, Dane was becoming a very big deal for Clay.

  “No smoking, drinking, illicit—” His sister hacked into the phone. “—drug use?”

  “Nothing worse than beer,” Clay swore.

  “Clay—”

  “I’ve promised Skip I’d bring stuff, Brina. It’s harmless. Jason and Holly will love it. The guys’ll have fun playing with them—I promise. Good people, playing. It’ll be great.”

  He didn’t mention soccer the next day because… well, because.

  And this way, he could explain to Skipper and Dane personally why he was dodging out when the Holy Church of Soccer seemed to need his pudgy ass on the field.

  Skipper’s gaming party was, if anything, better with the addition of kids and a dog.

  Skip and Richie’s first choice for a dog, their mutual, oh my God I can’t live without him, love-at-first-sight choice of friend and companion for life had been a cross between a wolf and a pony.

  Sure, the card had said German Shepherd/American Boxer, but Carpenter had said wolf and pony, and then Richie had remembered that book they’d all read in the eighth grade and said, “We could call him Ponyboy, right, Skip?” And that was it. They were taking the gigantic thing home.

  He was barely three months old, and he already looked bigger than Richie. But when Carpenter brought the kids over, Skip had turned on the back-porch lights, and Jason and Holly spent two hours outside in the cold, throwing that puppy the stick, the toy, and the ball while Dane egged them on. Yeah, it wasn’t technically gaming at that point, but Skip’s house was always super crowded at the beginning, while the people who only stopped by because it was Skip and they loved him ate potato chips. Once those people cleared out, there was room for Holly and Jason in the bedroom, where they excitedly played with the grown-ups in the front room, who were trying desperately to temper their language.

  “So, you really can’t make the game tomorrow?” Dane asked as they waited their turn on the controller. “I mean, Mason’s going to cheer on the troops—”

  “How’s his ankle?” Carpenter asked. “Seriously, it still looks super painful when we see him at work.”

  Dane grimaced. “Super painful. Some guys, they roll an ankle and they get back up and play the game. My brother? It takes him out for a month.”

  “I am aware,” Skip said dryly, w
andering in from checking on the kids. “You sure you won’t come play with us? I was getting used to having subs on the field.”

  Dane shook his head loftily, but Clay could see the exhaustion bruising his eyes. He’d started school again that week, and had complained of insomnia as well. Clay had poked delicately at the “Are you taking your meds” wound, and the response had been… evasive.

  “I shall be watching and evaluating from the corner,” Dane said with a yawn. “But you people all enjoy your game.”

  He said it with that unconscious Bay Area snobbery that seemed to be so deeply ingrained, Carpenter wasn’t sure he saw it when it came out. In Dane’s case, it was charming, but Carpenter was aware that there were times it wasn’t.

  Watching Dane freak out over his brother’s boyfriend’s crappy Toyota was funny. Listening to him talk to Skip about getting a “real” degree so he could teach was not.

  “What?” Dane asked when Skip wandered away from the conversation.

  “He worked his ass off for that piece of paper on his cubicle,” Carpenter said quietly. “I know it’s not UC Davis or UCLA, but when you don’t grow up with much, having a job that pays health and dental is living the dream.”

  Dane sucked in a breath. “I’m an idiot,” he muttered savagely, surprising Carpenter. “A fucking moron. Jesus, you’d think I could learn to watch my fucking mouth.”

  And there—right there—was the answer as to whether or not Dane was taking his meds.

  “Do you have your meds with you?” Clay asked, a little shocked at the authority in his voice.

  Dane winced. “No. No, dammit—they’re at home in my backpack. I sort of spaced out and almost didn’t get here on time.”

  Carpenter cocked his head. “There’s an on time to a gaming party?”

  “I didn’t want to be late!” Dane gave a tired smile. “It’s a social event. I don’t do many of these, and now you see why.”