Billy's Bones (7 page)

She was speaking on the other end of Tom’s cell phone, but he could picture her shocked expression in his mind.

“It’s not just me, then?” Tom asked. “It’s weird?”

“That’s hardly a professional assessment.” Sue’s voice was now tinged with humor. Tom could tell he’d be in for some teasing about this situation come Monday. “Considering the fact that he’s straight and you barely know him, I would say it’s… atypical. It’s not like I’ve never heard of two straight men sharing a bed in a nonsexual context. You were both intoxicated and you claim there was no place else to sleep.”

“No, the place was filthy. There wasn’t even a chair inside that didn’t have crap piled on it.”

“I would say that he’s either just a nice guy willing to put up with an awkward situation to keep you from driving home in that condition, or perhaps he’s overcompensating a bit.”

“Overcompensating? For what?” The first thing that popped into Tom’s mind was “seven inches.” But that was slightly above average.

“For being a homophobic ass on Monday,” Sue said, her tone suggesting that he was being dense, which he probably was.

“Oh. I suppose he might be trying to prove how open-minded he can be.”

Tom heard something outside and pulled his bedroom curtain aside to see Kevin’s truck pulling into the driveway.
Shit
. Tom had showered a couple hours ago, but he hadn’t dressed yet. He was getting into the habit of not wearing clothes in the house or around the backyard. Apparently, living in isolation was bringing out the nudist in him.

“Be careful, Tom. He might push it farther than he’s really comfortable with, and then things could get ugly.”

Tom had a hard time imagining Kevin getting “ugly,” if by that Sue meant “violent.” On the other hand, it was also hard to imagine Kevin hanging himself.

“I’ve got to go. He just pulled into the driveway.”

“Christ, do you spend
any
time apart from him when you’re not in the office?”

“I’ll see you on Monday.” Then Tom hung up.

I
T
DID
feel rather… domestic, Tom had to admit, shopping for furniture with Kevin. Like they were a couple moving into their first home together. Kevin didn’t just stand back and let Tom pick out what he liked. He acted as if it would be his furniture too and had to try out every chair and poke through all the dresser drawers. When Mike, the owner of the shop, led them to a beautiful old brass bed, Kevin immediately crawled onto it and stretched out full-length on the mattress.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s kind of lumpy.”

“Are you planning on sleeping in my bed very often?” Tom asked.

Kevin had the good grace to blush a little, but he was still grinning, which made him look all the more adorable.

His friend, Mike Davis, was an older man who still wore suspenders, like Tom’s grandfather had, making Tom wonder just how old the cutoff for suspenders was. Seventy? Sixty-five? Sixty? Certainly, nobody under fifty wore them anymore. But Mike was charming, peering through round spectacles as they wove through stacks of bric-a-brac that threatened to topple down upon their heads. The antique shop was an enormous old barn, and it still had the original horse stalls and traces of hay embedded in the uneven wooden floor.

“You can get a new mattress,” Mike pointed out to Kevin, as if he and Tom were shopping for a bed
together
, which Tom found both amusing and annoying. Also a little strange, since Mike should have known Kevin wasn’t gay. “Sometimes these old ones have bedbugs or fleas in them.”

“Especially with him rolling all over it,” Tom said dryly. “Look, he’s not the one looking to buy it. But yes, of course I’d buy a new mattress.”

Tom shooed Kevin off the bed and leaned against the corners of it to see how stable the frame was. Rock solid. And the brass was in perfect condition. “I do like it,” he admitted. “Do you deliver?”

Mike shook his head, but Kevin said, “We can fit it in the back of my truck, if we take it apart.”

So that’s what they did. It took a good twenty minutes or more to take the frame apart since it obviously hadn’t been disassembled in years—perhaps not since the bed was first purchased by some family back in the early 1900s. Then they loaded it into the back of Kevin’s truck, along with a kitchen table and a few kitchen chairs. Kevin had removed the covering over the flatbed before he picked Tom up, but even so, Tom was amazed they managed to fit everything in there.

When they got to his house, Kevin helped him assemble the bed, but of course without a mattress, it was nearly useless.

“Do you have any idea where I can get a mattress around here?” Tom asked.

Kevin finished tightening a massive screw and straightened up, mopping sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve. “Not a clue. I’ve never bought one.”

“What about that bed at your trailer?” Tom almost added, “that we slept in,” but he thought better of it.

“Tracy’s uncle brought that over for us.”

Tom nodded. “I guess I’ll go online and see what I can find. There’s got to be something in Berlin.” Not that Berlin was all that big a city, with just over ten thousand people. But a mattress store shouldn’t be impossible to locate.

“Yeah.” Kevin seemed to be debating something for a few moments before he finally said, “Guess I should get going. I’ve got to finish stripping those wires before Monday, and this guy down the road wanted me to do some yard work tomorrow.”

Tom sensed he was reluctant to leave, and Tom didn’t want him to go. But it would probably do him some good to have a couple of days or more away from Kevin. He was starting to feel too close to the man—closer than he should feel for a friend. He kept remembering what it had been like to wake up beside Kevin.

“Okay. Thanks for helping me find some furniture. If you want to hang out sometime soon, just give me a call.”

“Yeah. If you find a mattress or any more furniture during the week and you need someone to haul it, you’ve got my number.”

T
HAT
evening, Tom decided it was silly to keep avoiding using the hot tub just because he was by himself. So he stripped down, removed the hot tub cover, and climbed in. It felt amazingly good. Muscles he didn’t even realize were aching suddenly began to uncoil. He spent a little while playing with the settings on the console, turning on different water jets, and illuminating the underside of his ass and dick with an eerie blue light. When he finally found a setting he liked, he leaned back and closed his eyes, relaxing into it and wishing Kevin were there, naked in the water with him.

M
ONDAY
was an uneventful day, apart from lunch with Sue, who kept lecturing him about letting his “infatuation” with Kevin get out of control. He nodded politely but mostly ignored her. That evening, he puttered around the house, having no idea what to do with himself. Arranging the table and chairs in the kitchen took all of five minutes, and finding the right spot for the bed upstairs took about the same. When he’d been in front of his computer in the office, Tom had looked online for mattress stores and found a couple. But oddly enough he didn’t see anything in Berlin. The nearest one was in Littleton, about a half hour away, and he wasn’t particularly motivated to go check it out.

What he did finally do was head over to Lee’s Diner for dinner. He knew he was hoping he might run into Kevin there, though he hated to admit he was really that pathetic. But the black truck wasn’t in the parking lot when he pulled in.

Tracy was there, though. In fact, she seemed oddly happy to see him.

“Hi, hon!” she bubbled at him when she brought the menu over to the table. “You’re Kev’s new friend, aren’t you?”

“I guess so.”

She leaned in confidentially and spoke in a low voice. “It’s nice to see that he
has
a friend. He’s such a loner.” She seemed to realize this could be interpreted badly, so she quickly added, “Not that he’s like a Unabomber or anything! He just spends too much time by himself. It’s good to see someone drag him out of his shell a little.”

If Tom hadn’t already decided he liked Kevin—maybe a bit too much—this “recommendation” might have had him running for the hills. But he smiled and said, “He seems like a good guy.”

Tracy took this as an invitation to sit down in the booth, which it hadn’t been, but her conspiratorial air was making Tom curious. The woman glanced around to make sure none of the other waitresses were watching, and then leaned forward across the table. “I hope you don’t mind, but Kev told me you were… you know….” She lowered her voice even further. “Gay.”

That was disconcerting. But Tom didn’t particularly want to be in the closet around here anyway. “Um… yes, I am.”

She placed a hand over his, as if the fact that she knew his “secret” somehow made them close friends. “That’s all good with me, hon. I think everybody has a right to live their life the way they want, long as they’re not bothering nobody else.”

“Thanks.”

If Tom had hoped the embarrassing moment would end there, he was mistaken. Tracy merely leaned in closer and asked, “Are you two… together now?”

He found himself really wishing she’d brought a glass of water over to the table before starting this conversation. His mouth had gone completely dry. “You were married to him. Why would you think he’s suddenly turned gay?”

“Oh, I
always
thought he was gay. I mean, after the first few times, he never laid a hand on me unless I got him drunk.” Tom could sense an undercurrent of something in her voice, but not what he might have expected. She didn’t seem hurt so much as… baffled. Tracy knew she was a beautiful woman. How any
straight
man could resist her was simply beyond her comprehension. Therefore, Kevin had to be gay.

Tom really didn’t feel comfortable discussing Kevin’s sexual dysfunction with a comparative stranger. Fortunately, he was rescued by Ellen walking by and giving Tracy the hairy eyeball. Tracy jumped up and said quickly, “I’ll be right back with a glass of water. Take your time with the menu.”

O
N
W
EDNESDAY
,
Tom arranged to take the second half of the day off so he could go to Littleton and browse around the two mattress stores there. What he really wanted was a “memory foam” mattress because he’d slept on one at one of his old boyfriend’s houses years ago and thought it was the most comfortable thing he’d ever slept on in his entire life. The first store didn’t have any, but he lucked out at the second. They had one the right size for his bed, and it was in stock.

The problem was getting it to his house. The store would deliver, but the price they quoted him was obscene. Before agreeing to anything, Tom stepped out into the parking lot and dialed Kevin on his cell phone.

“What’s up?” Kevin answered cheerfully.

“I know this is sudden, so if you’re busy—”

“No, man, I’m fine.”

“Would you be willing to take an hour or two of your time to transport a mattress from Littleton to my house? I’ll pay you your hourly rate.” Kevin charged twenty-five dollars an hour when he was on the clock, but it was still significantly cheaper than what the store wanted.

“Sure, man. Right now?”

“I’m at the store.” He gave Kevin the address.

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

Tom told the salesman to hold the mattress, just in case of a sudden run on memory foam mattresses, and went down the street for a cup of coffee. When he returned, Kevin was pulling in. He’d brought an old sheet to prevent the mattress from getting covered with rust or grease, which Tom appreciated, and it didn’t take long to load the thing into the truck bed along with a matching box spring.

They drove back to Tom’s house and spent an entertaining half hour hauling both the mattress and the box spring out of the truck and then wrestling them through the front door and up the stairs into the master bedroom.

The moment everything was in place on the brass bed frame, Kevin yelled “Banzai!” and did a belly flop onto the mattress. Tom laughed and imitated him.

“Wow!” Kevin exclaimed. “This thing is awesome!”

“Most comfortable bed you’ll ever sleep in, motherfucker!” Tom snapped back, only somewhat conscious of the implications of that statement. He leaned out over the side of the bed and grabbed his pillow off the mat and sleeping bag he’d been sleeping on. Then he fell back on the mattress, tucking the pillow behind his head.

Kevin did something weird then: he rolled over onto his back and casually shifted his body closer so his head could rest on the pillow alongside Tom’s. Tom wasn’t sure what to make of it. He felt Kevin’s soft brown hair brushing his forehead and Kevin’s left elbow lightly touching his, and he thought back to what Tracy had said in the diner. Was Kevin really gay? Had he felt trapped in his marriage, especially when Tracy got pregnant? If so, he seemed to be in denial about it, even now.

But that was a very dangerous line of reasoning. Tom was well aware that he
wanted
Kevin to be gay. It would be very easy for him to fool himself into thinking Kevin was a closet case, waiting for the right man—Tom, of course—to come along and rescue him. But some straight men were just affectionate; some just had sexual problems that had nothing to do with being gay.

“I heard you were talking to Tracy the other day,” Kevin said, startling Tom out of his thoughts.

“What? We talked for about five seconds! How the hell could you hear about that?”

Kevin laughed. “How do you think?”

Tom thought about it for a second and replied, “Ellen.”

“No shit. That place is Gossip Central.”

“Okay. So, yes, I was talking to Tracy. If you’re going to get jealous, I would remind you that I’m gay, and Lee is already sleeping with her.”

Kevin whipped his left arm at him to give him a sharp jab in the upper thigh with his knuckle.

“Ow!”

“Way to be sensitive, asshole.”

But Tom could tell Kevin wasn’t angry, and it felt good to have a friend he could poke at like this, even if it resulted in a few bruises. When Kevin didn’t pursue it, he said, “So? Don’t pretend you brought it up just to be conversational. Aren’t you going to ask me what we talked about?”