Don't Read in the Closet volume one

by Various Authors

  I nodded. “Yeah. It’s fine. He’s gone, had to check on the shipping center over in Amarillo or something.” It didn’t matter. He was always gone. Some days I wasn’t even sure he’d been there at all the night before. The house seemed empty and unloved. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. If it hadn’t been for Brooklyn, I’d have left weeks before.

  It would be so easy when we were in college. Or after. When we could go anywhere, do anything, that we wanted. I knew I shouldn’t presume; that we’d stay together, that he’d want to make serious plans with me. Even after what he’d said, nothing was certain. I wanted it, though. All of it. I guessed I could only wait to see what the future held.

  Brooklyn tugged on my hair. “Hey. You wanna walk to the Dairy Freeze and get a frosty cone?”

  I had to smile. “Are you hungry again?”

  “Yeah.”

  He was always hungry. “Okay. Give me twenty minutes to relax and collect myself and then we’ll go.”

  * * * *

  “Next in line please!” I felt like I’d been standing there forever, right behind Brooklyn in the “p-t” line at registration. We were picking up our class schedules, our dorm assignments, everything that would shape our lives for the next few months at least. My stomach was a little fluttery. I hoped my roommate was cool with everything. I wasn’t going to go back to Sugarcreek, literally or in any other way. Brooklyn turned around holding his packet in his hands. He looked a little nervous too.

  “Hey, I’ll meet you at the tree over there.” He pointed to a big oak about fifty feet away.

  I nodded and went up to get my papers. After I had the thick envelope in my hand, I ripped it open and shuffled through the schedules and orientation pamphlets, looking for what I was worried about the most—my dorm assignment. I hoped it didn’t suck.

  Please don’t let it suck.

  Martin Hall. Room 208. It was a freshman dorm, not the nicest but it was in a good part of campus. I wouldn’t have to walk a million miles to get to class every day. That was a relief.

  “Hey, babe. What dorm did you get?” Brooklyn was looking over his papers.

  “Martin.”

  “Me too! Nice. I’m in two—“

  I caught a glance at his paper and snorted. I couldn’t help smiling. He saw my grin and he already knew.

  “You’re in two oh eight too, aren’t you?”

  I nodded, then I started laughing. Brooklyn joined in, laying his head on my shoulder and reaching down to thread our fingers together without even glancing around to see who might be looking. We weren’t in Sugarcreek anymore. That much was for sure.

  It figured that we’d been stuck together again. Why not? We always were. I was starting to wonder if me and Brooklyn Thorn might just be stuck together for life. I have to say that was fine with me.

  I could think of far worse things.

  THE END

  Author bio: M.J. O'Shea has been writing romance since algebra class in sixth grade (when most of her stories starred her and Leonardo DiCaprio). When she's not writing, she loves listening to nearly all types of music, painting, reading great authors, and on those elusive sunny days in the Pacific Northwest, she loves driving on the freeway with her windows rolled down and her stereo on high.

  Social Networking:

  Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/351...

  Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/MjOsheaSeattle

  Blog: http://mjoshea.com/

  Neil S. Plakcy – PHOTO BOOTH (Cowboys/FBI)

  Selected by Neil S. Plakcy

  Dear Author,

  See this guy?

  [PHOTO: A black/white photo of a muscular man standing in an old building. He's wearing white boxers and a cowboy hat, carrying a jean jacket and his black cowboy boots. The door behind him stands open; the one in front of him shows his silhouette in the frosted window.]

  He's away from the ranch and the life as he has known it for the first time. He found a room in this, well, shabby inn, but mysterious things seem to happen all around. Things vanish, people don't remember that they met before (or pretend to) and someone threatens the owner of the inn (seemingly for no reason). And now, coming home from a long day of looking for a way to provide for himself, he finds somebody in his room, going through his things, drawing his secrets into the open. A bad thing? Or maybe his chance to start a new life with a new kind of love?

  I would be thrilled to read his story!

  Love,

  Calathea

  Genre: contemporary

  Tags: erotic, cowboys, FBI

  Words: 4,250

  PHOTO BOOTH

  By Neil S. Plakcy

  “Are you a real cowboy?”

  The cute, blond twink leaned up against the bar next to me.

  “Used to be,” I said.

  “Really? I think cowboys are sexy as hell.” He arched his back and turned his head sideways so I could see into his light green eyes. I had just two-stepped for about an hour at this country and western bar in Montrose, the gay neighborhood of Houston, and I was dying of thirst, but the only attention I could get was from this twink, not from the bartender.

  “Well, this cowboy’s dry as a patch of west Texas desert,” I said. “Who do you have to blow to get a beer in this joint?”

  “You just have to know how to ask.” The twink turned to the bar and waved his hand in a broad gesture. “Yoo-hoo, Billy boy! Need a couple of beers down here.”

  The bartender, a buff guy in a tight t-shirt, looked our way and grimaced, but he shot two unopened bottles of Bud down the bar. The twink caught them both neatly, and passed one to me. “I’m Paul,” he said.

  “Darren.” I took the beer, twisted off the cap, and tapped it against Paul’s.

  “If you used to be a cowboy, but you aren’t now, what are you doing?” Paul asked.

  “Looking for work. But the only things I know how to do are work with cattle, and there isn’t much call for that in the city.”

  “I’ll bet you know how to do a few other things.” Paul moved his leg in close to mine.

  “Yeah, but I don’t take money for that.”

  He leaned over and kissed me on the lips. His mouth tasted like cheap beer but I didn’t care. I put my hand behind his head and pulled him close to me, then pried open his lips with my tongue.

  “Get a room!” one of the old queers at the end of the bar called out.

  Paul pulled back off me and said, “I want to have my picture taken with a real cowboy. Come on.”

  He led me across the dance floor to one of those photo booths, four pictures on a strip for a buck. He fed two dollar bills in and tugged me inside, pulling the curtain shut. We kissed and mugged for the camera-- me wearing my tan cowboy hat, then Paul wearing it.

  When the lights went off, we stepped back out to the dance floor and Paul pulled the two strips from the machine. He handed one to me and put the other in his pocket.

  “Don’t go anywhere, handsome,” he said. “I’ve got to take a wicked piss. But I’ll be right back.”

  I watched his cute butt sashay across the dance floor toward the mens’ room, and then went back to the bar, where I managed to order another beer without his help. By the time I finished it, though, Paul still had not returned.

  “Fucking silly twink,” I grumbled. Why come on so strong to me, only to disappear? Had he gotten a better offer in the mens’ room?

  After another hour, I gave up and went back to the Lone Star, the shabby motel where I’ve been staying. If I’d had more notice before leaving the ranch, I might have saved up some more money for this change of life-- but the issue was thrust upon me rather than being one I prepared for. So I was stuck at this dump until I could get a new job.

  It was a creepy place, an old home been converted to a rooming house. There had been at least three different clerks on duty at the front desk since I checked in, and I hadn’t seen the guy who rented me the room in the first place. I get the feeling the place is more of a dirty
sheets place for quick encounters rather than long-term stays, but I got a pretty good rate by the week so I couldn’t complain.

  I spent the first couple of days of the next week out looking for work. It’s tough when ranching was all I’d ever done from the time I was a kid. Couldn’t operate a cash register or a deep fryer. Couldn’t type or operate a phone switchboard. About the only thing I could do in the big bad city was maintenance work, and there were too many folks a lot more desperate than I was who were willing to work for peanuts.

  On Wednesday I spent another fruitless day filling out applications and getting nothing more concrete than “We’ll get back to you.” It was a hot, humid afternoon and I was sweating. I didn’t have a car, so I had to take the bus everywhere, and walk six blocks in the scorching sun back to the Lone Star.

  In the lobby the clerk, a heavyset Mexican woman, was yelling in Spanish at a skinny drunk with scraggly gray hair. He turned to me, but instead of saying anything, he threw up. All over me.

  “Fuck!” I said. The guy looked at me, then darted back out the front door, leaving me with his puke dribbling down my shirt and pants. The Mexican woman disappeared behind the counter, and when she didn’t return I figured it was up to me to get cleaned up. I pulled off my shirt, then kicked off my cowboy boots.

  I shucked down my puke-stained trousers. I held them in one hand, my shirt and jeans in the other, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. When I got there, I saw the door of my room was ajar. I thought at first the maid must be in there, but there was no housekeeping cart anywhere. I looked inside to see a man of about my age -- early forties, if you want to know the truth -- standing next to the dresser, looking through my drawers.

  Both kinds-- the dresser drawers, and my boxer shorts. “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked.

  “Ethan Owens?” the guy said, looking up.

  “That’s me. But who the hell are you?”

  “Agent Martin Brice. FBI.” He held up a badge. I stepped into the grubby, dim room and had to get up close to him to read it.

  He smelled good, that close. Looked good, too, if I have to admit. Close-cropped blond hair, enough lines on his face to be interesting. But he got a whiff of the vomit on me and backed away too fast.

  “What’s this about?” I asked. “They aren’t pressing charges against me, are they?”

  “Who would that be?” Agent Brice asked.

  “At the Bar None. The dude ranch where I worked until the foreman caught me getting a blow job from one of the guests.”

  “That what you did with Christopher Graf? Give him a blow job?”

  I didn’t like the guy’s attitude, but all the same I felt myself getting hard. I just hoped my dick wouldn’t pop through the slit in my boxers. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Sure you do.” The agent held up the strip of pictures the blond twink and I had taken at the bar. “Here he is.”

  I shrugged. “Didn’t get his name. We danced, we took the pictures, then he told me he had to go to the john. Never came back.”

  The agent pulled a spiral notepad from his pocket. “Details, please.”

  I dropped my boots by the closet, and balled up the puke-stained shirt and jeans. There was a washing machine in the basement we could use. I’d have to pay a visit down there when I got rid of the G-Man.

  “Mind if I get dressed first?” I asked.

  “All the same to me.”

  Interesting response. But I pulled on a pair of running shorts over my briefs, then told him the name of the bar, the day and time, and repeated the story, what little there was of it. When I finished, I said, “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

  “Mr. Graf is missing,” Brice said. “And it looks like you were the last person to see him alive.”

  I stepped over to the window and flipped the blinds, so the room was illuminated with the rays of the afternoon sun. “Say that again, please.”

  “Mr. Graf never showed up at his office on Monday morning. I interviewed his roommates, who said that he left home on Saturday evening to go to a bar called Southern Nights, on Montrose. Bartender there recognized Mr. Graf, knew he was a regular. He saw him dirty dancing with a cowboy.”

  “They still call it that?” I asked. “Thought that went out in the eighties.”

  “Wouldn’t know,” Brice said. “Asked around the bar, and someone gave me your name, said you lived here at the Lone Star.”

  “Don’t you need a warrant to look through my things?”

  Brice held a piece of paper out to me. “Said warrant. Gives me the right to search your room for evidence pertaining to the disappearance of Christopher Graf.”

  I took the paper from him and tried to read it, but it was just gibberish to me.

  “You want to change your story now?” Brice asked. “Maybe you and Graf came back here, things got a little out of hand…”

  “Only thing I had in my hand that night was my dick,” I said. “Since this twink you call Graf got me hot and bothered and then dumped me.”

  “Why’d you keep these pictures, then?”

  I shrugged. “Didn’t get around to throwing ‘em away. I’ve been looking for a job. Didn’t have energy to focus on anything else.”

  Brice made a note on his little pad. Probably that I was homeless and unemployed. “Anyone who can vouch for you Saturday night?” he asked.

  “I got myself a beer after Graf left for the men’s room. Stood around the bar for at least a half hour by myself drinking it.”

  Brice nodded. “That’s what the bartender said.”

  “Then I came on back here. Don’t have a car, so I had to take the bus. You could probably track my Metro card.” I dug it out of my pocket. “Can you just copy down the number? I’m gonna need it tomorrow.”

  He took the card from me and wrote down the number. “And after you got back here?” he asked. “Anybody see you?”

  I shook my head. “Not that I noticed. This place doesn’t go for a regular clientele.”

  “Oh, they’re regular, all right,” Brice said. “They just don’t stay for very long.” I noticed there was something changed in his body language, like maybe he wasn’t thinking of me as a serious suspect any more. Or maybe it was that I caught him checking out my crotch.

  “Yeah, I figured that out. But it’s all I can afford.”

  He pulled a card from his wallet. “If you hear anything from Mr. Graf, or anyone who knows him, give me a call.”

  I took the card, and our fingertips brushed. I felt a brief electric charge from that, and looked up at him. He was smiling, a kind of half smile. “And even if I don’t know anything, can I give you a call?” I asked.

  “Let’s stick to if you know anything,” he said. “Or if you decide for any reason that you need to leave town.”

  “If I don’t find a job in another week, I’ll have to try someplace else.”

  He put his notebook away. “Well, good luck with that.”

  I was blocking his exit from the small room, and we did a little dance, me going one way and him the same, then again, until he could get past me.

  I treated myself to a look at his ass as he walked through the parking lot to his car. It was a damn fine one. Too bad I was such a loser that I couldn’t attract more than a little bit of interest from him.

  I’d never had trouble getting men before. Not at the ranch, for the most part; I followed that advice not to shit where you eat, that is, right up until that dude whose dick I sucked made me an offer I just couldn’t refuse. It was part genetics and part ranch work. I had a good-looking face, and my body was hard in all the right places.

  But Agent Brice hadn’t cared a bit. And even Christopher Graf, whoever he was, hadn’t liked my looks enough to come back out of the mens’ room.

  I didn’t get any luckier the rest of the week. I applied for job after job with no success, and I didn’t know what I could do. I couldn’t go back to the Bar None, and I was sure they’d spread
the word to every ranch in the area. Saturday night I was determined not to go back to Southern Nights. I couldn’t see spending any of my dwindling capital on beer and the chance to get lucky.

  But boredom overtook me, and around eleven o’clock I hopped a bus to the bar. Just one beer, I thought. I could make one beer last for a couple of hours. Maybe I’d dance a little, if they had some line dancing going on. Maybe I’d even get lucky. Though that was looking pretty dubious.

  It was another hot, humid night, and by the time I got to the bar I was ready to strip my pearl-buttoned shirt off and see if my washboard abs could buy me a drink. Stranger things have happened.

  The bouncer didn’t even card me, the bastard. As if I looked every bit of forty. But once inside, I did pull off my shirt and slung it over my shoulder, and I saw a lot of eyes turn my way. Including a pair I found familiar. Agent Brice’s.

  “Back to the scene of the crime?” I asked him, tracking him to the side wall.

  “Turns out the crime didn’t occur here at all,” he said. “We found Graf’s body in a culvert off the San Jacinto River.”

  “Aww.” I hardly knew the guy, but still, it was a pity he was dead. “You know what happened to him?”

  “He was a clerk at an oil company where we suspected some illegal activity was going on. He was supplying the Bureau with information, and someone found out about it.”

  “That twink? He was an informant?”

  Brice nodded.

  “So if the crime didn’t happen here, then what are you doing here?” I looked at him. He sure wasn’t dressed the way he had been at the Lone Star. Gone was the dark suit, the white shirt, the navy tie. In its place was a Tommy Bahama shirt with a print of parrots and jungles on it, and a very trim pair of jeans. He was even wearing well-worn cowboy boots, scuffed at the toes.

  “Thought I might celebrate with a beer or two,” Brice said. “Maybe pick up a new friend.” He looked at me, and that half-smile I’d noticed had turned into a full grin. “Maybe even a cowboy.”