Strays and Lovers

by John Inman

  But today he wasn’t interested in the shed. He was interested in the man walking along in front of him. Too interested, maybe. It was a chore dragging his eyes off Grissom’s long legs and narrow butt.

  “You must be new in town,” he ventured, trying not to sound too nosy. “I don’t remember seeing you around before.”

  “Then I guess you didn’t,” Gray intoned, barely tossing the words back over his shoulder. He pointed a long forefinger straight ahead. “Your chicken wire’s over there.”

  “Thanks,” Eddie mumbled, then took another stab at trying not to sound nosy. “So where do you live? In Spangle?”

  Gray Grissom stopped and turned. He swiped the wind-tousled hair from his eyes and all but sighed in exasperation. “No. I live out of town. Is there anything else you want to know about me before we get back to the business at hand?”

  Eddie lowered his eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I was just curious.”

  Gray didn’t look appeased. “You and everybody else who comes in here. I’m not too fond of personal questions. I’d rather just do my job and get on with it, if you want to know the truth. I get a little tired of reciting my personal history every time somebody new walks in to buy a screwdriver.”

  “Or chicken wire,” Eddie offered.

  “Yeah. Or chicken wire.”

  Eddie wasn’t embarrassed any longer. He was irked. Still, he knew he had only himself to blame, so he swallowed his pride and apologized. “Like I said, I’m sorry. Let me fetch my purchase, and I’ll get out of your hair. You’d clearly rather be alone.”

  “I would, and it’s over there,” Gray said, pointing again toward the shed, clearly not about to fetch it himself.

  Eddie didn’t respond this time. He slipped past Gray without looking at him, snagged the fat roll of chicken wire leaning against the door of the shed, and hefted it awkwardly onto his shoulder.

  “Need help?” Gray asked, obviously not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him.

  “No,” Eddie grunted, barely civil. “Got it.” Without another word, he humped the wire onto the loading dock, in through the hardware store’s back door, and up to the counter without once looking back.

  Ruth was still perched out of sight on her three-legged stool behind the counter, cradling Louie. No other customers were in sight. Her old eyes peeked over the countertop when Eddie approached.

  “Did you meet him?” she asked.

  Eddie dragged a credit card out of his wallet. “I met him. I’ll charge this wire if it’s okay.”

  Ruth looked doubtful. Not about the credit card, but about Eddie. “Didn’t you like him?”

  “He’s great. A real charmer,” Eddie said, avoiding her eyes. “But I need to get back to the refuge. Got a delivery of dog food coming. If I’m not there, they won’t leave it.” It was a lie, but Ruth didn’t need to know that.

  “Sure,” Ruth said. “If you’re in a hurry, you’re in a hurry. This ain’t social hour, after all. We all have duties to fulfill.” She quickly rang up the sale, only once glancing to the back of the store as if wondering what had happened between Eddie and Gray.

  Eddie signed the sales slip, retrieved his credit card, hefted the roll of chicken wire onto his shoulders with a grunt, shot Ruth a wink to let her know they were still friends, and whistled for Louie to follow. Without another word, he left the store, feeling Ruth’s eyes on him every step of the way.

  Oblivious to human interactions that didn’t concern him, Louie bounced along at Eddie’s feet, tail high, half dragging, half chewing on the dried pig’s ear Ruth had given him as a parting gift, since it was really too big for him to handle.

  At the Jeep, Eddie took a last look back. Around the side of the store at the entrance to the loading area, he spotted Gray Grissom leaning against the tin shed, watching him go.

  Eddie thought about lifting a hand to wave goodbye, but he didn’t think about it very long. He scooped Louie up onto his shoulder, climbed into the cab, and drove off without another glance.

  Strangely, he was more curious about the new helper at the Spangle Hardware Store now than he was before.

  EDDIE WASN’T the handiest person in the world. That unassailable fact was made crystal clear as he stood in his backyard, jumping up and down, screaming like a banshee, desperately clutching the thumb he had just banged with the goddamn hammer. It was tricky, dancing and swearing and stomping around with a mouthful of three-inch nails, but he managed it pretty well. He knew how ridiculous he probably looked—a big, hairy-chested, middle-aged guy prancing around like a second-grader with tears in his eyes because he had just whapped his stupid thumb with a stupid hammer, but since there was no one around to watch, he didn’t much care how ridiculous he looked.

  The kennel he had told Ruth about back at the store wasn’t turning out anywhere close to the way he’d envisioned it. And like he had also told Ruth, constructing the blasted thing would have been a heck of a lot easier with a second pair of hands helping out. Especially a pair of hands that actually knew what they were doing. Josh was useless with tools, so there was no help to be found there. Blaize was even more worthless than Josh. For Ruth’s benefit, Eddie had sighed dramatically and told her he would have to muddle through on his own. It wouldn’t be the first time. And now here he was. Muddling. Louie, Lucretia, and Fred lay on the back porch in the shade, neatly lined up in a row with their heads on their paws, watching him jump around, cussing like a fool. Was it his imagination, or did he hear them chortling with suppressed laughter?

  Eddie finally sucked up the pain, angrily brushed the tears from his cheeks, took one last look at his poor damaged thumbnail, which was already turning black, and went back to work. It wasn’t the chicken wire he was having trouble with, it was the kennel’s framework. He simply wasn’t a carpenter. That’s all there was to it. It didn’t help that he had picked the hottest day of the year to tackle the job. The sun beat down on him like he was laid out under the lid of a George Foreman grill. He had yanked his shirt off hours ago, leaving himself bare-chested, but he wasn’t any cooler without it. The shirt was currently hanging on a cactus by the back fence.

  Trying to man up and ignore not only his throbbing thumb but the godawful heat, Eddie stood there with a 2x4 in one hand and the traitorous hammer in the other, panting with exhaustion and wondering what his next brilliant move should be.

  Before he could figure it out, a voice behind him said, “It looks like the lumber’s winning.”

  Eddie jumped straight up into the air and spun around so fast he almost blacked out.

  There, propped against the corner of the house with his arms crossed, stood Gray Grissom. He still needed a haircut, like he had when Eddie met him at the store a few days ago, and he still wore the same work clothes that needed ironing. He also still looked handsome and rugged and a little less than friendly. Ruth must have taken pity on Eddie and dropped a pretty strong hint that her employee should stop by to help him out.

  The three dogs, taken as much by surprise as Eddie, rushed up to greet the visitor, tails wagging, tongues lolling, friendly to a fault with not a bark between them. Louie took it one step further and tried to climb right up Gray Grissom’s pant leg like a cat. Gray grinned down at him and scooped him into his arms. Holding him in front of his face, he gave the pup a kiss on the nose before setting him back on the ground.

  “My ferocious herd of guard dogs,” Eddie mumbled wryly around a mouthful of nails.

  Gray grinned down at the tiny pup who was now sitting on his foot, staring up, yawning. “Yeah. So I see. I guess I’m lucky to be alive.” As he had the first time they met, Eddie found himself mesmerized by those captivating gray eyes peeking through a thicket of sun-bleached hair, even if they did look vaguely appalled as he stared over Eddie’s right shoulder to survey what Eddie had built so far.

  Eddie turned to study it too, and he wasn’t impressed either. With a groan of defeat, he dropped the hammer and the 2x4 at his
feet, raising two little clouds of dust. Reaching around behind him, he plucked a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the sweat off his face.

  Gray tipped his head in the direction of the nails poking out between Eddie’s lips. “Don’t swallow those,” he said, teasing back a smile. “You’ll have a powerful bellyache if you do.”

  Eddie spit the nails into his hand. “What are you doing here?” As if he didn’t know. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Hopefully, it’s more a matter of me helping you. Ruth sent me,” Gray said. “Told me if I didn’t you’d probably die up here, tangled up in your own chicken wire.”

  “Funny,” Eddie drawled, eyelids at half-mast.

  “And fairly prescient, by the look of things,” Gray added. This time he didn’t try to hold back his grin as he studied the lopsided framework of Eddie’s dog run. Chewing on his lower lip for a moment, he stated sadly, “It’s crooked, you know.”

  Eddie straightened his back and kicked at the hammer in the dust. His smashed thumb was killing him, but shooting for stoic, he decided not to mention it. “Everybody’s a critic. If you think you can do any better, come over here and prove it.”

  “Do I get paid, or will you be thinking of this more along the lines of a neighborly good deed?”

  Eddie thought about his puny bank balance. “Good deed, definitely. And one much appreciated. Besides, I can do better than pay you with money.”

  “What’s better than money?”

  “Food. I’ll fix you a home-cooked meal.”

  “You mean dinner?”

  “Yeah. Dinner.”

  Gray looked doubtful. “Do you cook any better than you build?”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  Gray’s one dimple popped into view, and lo and behold, Eddie spotted Gray’s demeanor softening a bit. “What are you serving?”

  “Meatloaf.”

  “It just so happens I love meatloaf.”

  Eddie smiled. “Well, there you go, then. Do we have a deal?”

  Gray matched Eddie’s smile with one of his own. “I guess maybe we do,” he said. And as if Gray’s smile wasn’t as heart-stoppingly handsome as any smile Eddie had ever seen, Gray gave Eddie something more to think about when he tugged off his shirt and tossed it on the porch.

  Eddie all but gasped. Gray Grissom without a shirt, and with those baggy khaki pants barely hanging on his lean hips, was an absolute knockout. A sprinkling of brown hair bristled on his chest, dribbling down in a narrow line across his flat stomach. It broadened into another luxurious mass of dark hair prior to disappearing down the front of his pants into wonderland—a place Eddie Hightower decided on the spot that he would most dearly love to visit. Yessiree.

  Eddie shook his head, trying to extricate that last thought. It could only lead to trouble.

  While he was busy trying to clean up his own thoughts, he also decided he had been correct back at the store. Gray Grissom had nicely defined pecs for a skinny guy. His shoulders were broad and straight, and his nipples were two brass coins, coyly peeking through the fuzz. Gray’s belly button was all but hidden in that southernmost explosion of belly hair that led toward the no-man’s-land behind the fly of his khaki work pants. The crotch of those pants also sported a rather intriguing bulge, but Eddie tried not to think about that either.

  “Here we are,” Eddie said, because he felt he had to say something. “Two fuzzy guys sweating in the sun.”

  Gray perused Eddie’s hairy chest and belly. “I’m nowhere near as fuzzy as you. You look like a yeti. Still, you look to be in pretty good shape for a guy your age.”

  Despite the snarky reference to his age, Eddie had to admit he liked having Gray Grissom’s gaze wandering over his body. And was it his imagination, or were those eyes actually lingering? “Thanks a lot,” he said, trying to look offended, but not quite pulling it off.

  “As for sweating,” Gray said, slowly lifting his gaze to Eddie’s face, “we’ll be doing a lot more of that if we ever get to work.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Gray strode across the dusty yard and scooped up the hammer at Eddie’s feet, giving Eddie a close-up view of the freckles sprinkled across Gray’s handsome shoulders. It was all Eddie could do not to reach down and stroke them to see how they felt.

  Standing straight and casually flipping the hammer from head to handle in his hand, Gray turned to study what Eddie had accomplished so far on his little construction project.

  “Jesus,” he muttered, clearly unimpressed. Then he turned, looking altogether suspicious, like maybe he was about to get the raw end of the deal. “Say now. Are mashed potatoes included?”

  Eddie tried to ignore all the stampeding hormones surging through his system. There was something about Gray Grissom looking suspicious that really turned him on. “What kind of person would serve meatloaf without mashed potatoes?”

  “Just checking,” Gray said, a satisfied smile spreading the corners of his mouth. “Guess I’d better get started, then.”

  And with that, he went to work. In less than two minutes, and before Eddie could say a single word, Gray had deconstructed everything Eddie had spent the last two hours building. When all the lumber was knocked and pried apart and laid out piecemeal on the ground, and all the nails prized out with the claw end of the hammer, which by the way seemed to be a far more congenial instrument in Gray’s hands than it had ever been in Eddie’s, Gray looked up and gave Eddie a wink.

  Eddie stared back in shock. “You took it all apart!”

  Gray looked down at the lumber at his feet. “I did. I really did. Best thing for it really. It was never going to be a dog run the way it was.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  Gray shot him a pitying frown, which still managed to make a dimple pop into view. “Not even close.”

  Eddie huffed. “Fine. Let’s do it your way, then.”

  Gray’s white teeth flashed in the sun. Eddie blinked and tried not to let his gaze forage down Gray’s lean stomach toward that promising bulge. Not while Gray was watching, at least.

  “You mean let’s do it the right way.” Gray grinned, tossing the hammer into the air again and snagging it on its way back down as gracefully as a juggler.

  Eddie’s eyes narrowed, but he was too captivated by the beauty in front of him to be truly insulted. Mostly for show, he dredged up a little sarcasm of his own.

  “Fine, bwana,” he snapped. “Show me what you got.”

  This time it was Gray’s turn to blink, as if wondering what Eddie Hightower meant by that. But he only paused for a moment. Pretty soon he turned toward the stack of newly disjointed lumber and ran a hand over his flat, naked stomach in contemplation.

  While Gray wasn’t looking, Eddie checked him out from head to toe and was forced to admit he didn’t find one single thing about the construction of Gray Grissom’s body that was anything less than sexy as hell.

  Brazen for him, he stepped forward and rested a hand on Gray’s freckled shoulder. When Gray didn’t seem to mind the contact, Eddie leaned in and said softly, “I really do cook better than I build, just so you know.”

  Gray turned to him, and with their faces only inches apart, he said, “Thank God for that. Now hand me a saw.”

  HOURS PASSED. Three of them. Each one hotter and sweatier than the one before. Gray only had to ask a few questions about size and placement of the structure, and the next thing Eddie knew his dog run began taking shape right before his eyes, with little or no help from him.

  When Gray stepped back at one point and asked Eddie how he thought it was looking, Eddie (who was sitting on the porch with the dogs by this time since Gray wouldn’t really let him do anything) tried not to look sour.

  “It’s too perfect,” he said. “It makes all the rest of the kennels and dog runs and cat condos I built look crooked.”

  Gray cast his gaze around the compound. “That’s because they are crooked.” He shot a teasing leer in Eddie’s direction. “Want me to tear everyt
hing down and start over?”

  “Don’t gloat just because you know how to pound a nail.”

  “Ooh. Touchy.”

  They eyeballed each other.

  Finally Eddie hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing it toward the house. “I’m going to start dinner. It’ll take the meatloaf a while to bake. Think you can get along without me?”

  Gray bit back a less-than-charitable guffaw. “I’ll do my best. Say, what’s that little white dog’s name?”

  Eddie stared down at Louie, who was sound asleep on the porch with his nose tucked under Eddie’s leg. He laid a hand over the pup’s back, and it almost covered him completely.

  “That’s Louie. Why?”

  “He’s a cutie.”

  “He is indeed.”

  “What breed is he?”

  Eddie screwed up his face in concentration. “Well, that’s a puzzlement. I figure he’s a mixture of maybe bichon frise, spitz, Pomeranian, and with a teaspoon or two of West Highland Terrier thrown in for flavor. Or maybe he’s none of those at all. Who the hell knows? Say, you want a beer?”

  Gray forearmed the sweat away from his eyes, and when he looked up, Eddie saw the first truly congenial expression he had ever seen on the young man’s face.

  “An ice-cold beer would be most welcome,” Gray said, hitching up his pants, since they always seemed to be on the verge of sliding off, which wouldn’t have bothered Eddie one little bit.

  Eddie smiled to himself at the formality of Gray’s response and stomped off into the house to snag two beers out of the fridge. While he was there, he checked through the front windows. The only automobile out front was his own. Sipping from his beer, he carried the other one back to Gray, who was standing on a stepladder, nailing one of the top pieces to the side of the Quonset hut the dog run was attached to.

  With Gray still standing on the ladder with his crotch at the level of Eddie’s face, which was a little mind-boggling, Eddie asked, “How did you get here? There’s no car out front.”