Hobbled (13 page)

Then he spotted the reflection of sunlight on water, shimmering across the ceiling.

“Hey,” Luke said. “I just remembered.”

Danny looked up to where Luke’s eyes were aimed. “What?”

Luke pointed to the bright dabs of reflected light, shifting and sparkling above their heads. “You have a pool! I saw it from my bedroom window.”

Danny thought he knew what Luke was getting at. “Oh. Yeah. You want to go for a swim?”

“I’d love it. Not right now. But maybe later. Okay?”

Danny laughed. “Sure. That’s what it’s there for. The only bad thing is, if you’re swimming in the pool, it means you won’t be in bed with me. I don’t think I’m too crazy about
that
idea. Nope. Uh-uh. Don’t like it at all.”

Luke pulled Danny into his arms and touched his lips to the cute little pout Danny had made for his benefit. Luke’s tongue shot out and wormed it’s way inside, scraping across Danny’s teeth, foraging around the roof of Danny’s mouth.

Danny giggled, and did the same to Luke.

Then they both started laughing. Finally, Luke broke the kiss.

“Let me go get Granger before he recarpets the house with dog poop. We’ll go for a swim later. Okay?”

Danny groaned. “You’ll have to swim alone. With all the concrete and electronics strapped to my legs, I’d either sink like a rock or electrocute my sorry ass. I’ll watch you, though. How’s that?”

“Deal,” Luke said and sprang out of bed.

Danny was thrilled by the sight of a naked Luke scooping his shorts off the floor and slipping them on. He wasn’t thrilled knowing Luke was leaving, though. He wasn’t thrilled about that at all.

When Luke saw Danny watching him, he came back to the bed and leaned down to give Danny another kiss. “Don’t worry. We’ll be back in bed before you know it. But I really do have to go get Granger. Unattended, he’s a poop machine.”

And then Luke was gone, thumping down the stairs and banging his way out the front door.

Danny climbed out of bed. For one of the few times in his life, he was smiling when he did it.

But his heart was aching just a little bit, too, having Luke out of his sight. Out of his arms.

Naked, wearing nothing but his ankle monitor and the fucking cast, Danny clomped his way across the bedroom floor, grabbed a couple of trash bags from the sink in the bathroom, and headed for the shower.

Frederick stopped shredding
Huckleberry Finn
long enough to watch Danny pull the trash bags over his feet. And all the time Frederick was watching, he was wondering where the hell his breakfast was.

Unfortunately for Frederick, the last thing on Danny’s mind right then was feeding the cat. The smile that kept popping up on his face as he stood beneath the warm spray and soaped himself down, didn’t get there because he was looking forward to opening a can of tuna or fondly remembering the last time he rattled a bag of Little Friskies.

Nope. That smile was there because he was wondering when he and Luke would get together again. And what they would do when they did. And how many times they would do it.

After all, for the first time in his life, it wasn’t only his
own
come he was washing off his long, lean body, now
was
it?

And those thoughts were so delicious to contemplate, Danny broke into song. And he sang so loud, and it echoed so horrendously between the shower walls and out the bathroom door, that Frederick made a
chuffing
noise and stalked off down the stairs to get away from it.

Damned humans anyway.

Chapter 7

O
NCE
Danny was dried off and dressed in his customary shorts and T-shirt, he headbanged his hair into place while grabbing the binoculars to see what was going on next door. Luke had only been gone for twenty minutes, but already Danny missed him.

Aiming the binoculars at Luke’s bedroom window without even
trying
to be sneaky about it, Danny saw Luke drying off with a towel as he meandered around his room stark naked with Granger padding along behind. The two of them seemed to be exploring their new domain, peeking into closets, switching lights on and off.

Danny grinned when Luke looked up and spotted Danny spying on him from across the way. Luke gave a sexy little striptease bump and grind for Danny’s benefit, and still drying his hair with the towel, Luke slid the window all the way up and leaned out to yell, “The water’s on! Yay!”

Danny laughed and gave him a thumbs-up. Then Danny stepped back from the window and grabbed his heart. Lord, that little bump and grind routine of Luke’s had sent the blood rushing to Danny’s groin like the levee in his diaphragm had burst. Suddenly Danny wasn’t sure which was worse: wanting something you’ve never had, or wanting something
again
you’ve only had a couple of times. He was referring to sex, of course. Well, no. He was referring to sex with
Luke
.

Then Danny remembered the two of them, him and Luke, crying out like lunatics as they happily shot come all over each other’s faces, and a bit of the blood that had just sluiced down to Danny’s dick, sluiced back up again and burned his cheeks. The memory made his heart start hammering even louder. He decided on the spot it was his brand-new favorite memory, that one. None of his other memories even came close to that one for sheer stopping power because it really did stop him cold every time it entered his head.

Danny gave himself a shake and stepped back to the window to see what Luke was doing now. But Luke and Granger were gone. Off to begin their day, Danny supposed. With a sad little exhalation of breath, Danny decided he should do the same. And using every ounce of willpower he possessed, he turned away from the window, set the binoculars aside, and headed for the stairs.

Today, to do his dad a favor (and also to maybe take his mind off sex for a bit), Danny decided he would clean windows. Inside and out, upstairs and down. It was a job he and his dad both hated, which was all the more reason to do it. Danny sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything now to get himself sent back to Indiana to live on the farm. Hell no! Unless Luke moved to Indiana, which seemed highly unlikely, Danny was staying right here. And the trick to staying here was to keep his father happy. Thus the windows.

But first—breakfast.

While Danny chomped his way through another humongous bowl of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries, he pondered life. And the first thing he pondered about life was the fact that now he thought he was pretty sure why people were always talking about and obsessing about and dreaming about and reading books about and watching movies about—wait for it—
sex
.

Danny couldn’t stop reliving every single moment of the night he had spent with Luke. At one point, he even caught himself just sitting there at the dining room table, spoon hanging forgotten in his hand, while he remembered the taste of Luke’s lips. The heat and pressure of them. Luke’s velvet tongue trying to worm its way inside Danny’s mouth, and then Danny doing the same to Luke. Their arms drawing each other close, hands exploring, cocks rubbing together. Cornflower-blue eyes studying him—studying him—

Then Danny remembered Luke flipping him onto his stomach and touching him
there
with that heavenly mouth of his. Just the thought of it made Danny’s hands tremble so badly he dropped his spoon in the cereal bowl, splashing milk halfway across the table.

Oy.

Danny made a concerted effort to eat the rest of his Crunch Berries without thinking any more about last night because he was never going to finish breakfast this way. Afterward, he slurped down his daily cup of coffee,
still
trying to block those memories from his mind, but without much success. Luke and his scrumptious body were everywhere inside Danny’s head and there was just no getting away from it.

So with his poor besotted skull still filled with last night’s wonders, Danny finally went to work. He gathered up rags, window cleaner, and a stepladder. And all the while he was lugging stuff to the front of the house, he was hoping he wouldn’t break his neck trying to maneuver with the damn cast and ankle monitor hindering his movements. Frederick wasn’t helping either, getting underfoot, winding in and out between Danny’s legs, wanting his head petted, wanting to play.

Danny was in the mood to play all right, but not with the cat. It took him about twenty seconds to figure out that sidestepping a needy cat and lugging a clunky old stepladder across the yard while balancing a shitload of cleaning supplies and sporting a hard-on all at the very same time was a recipe for disaster. Something had to go before he broke his neck.

So he shooed away the cat and gave his dick a friendly pat on the head instead, after looking around to make sure no neighbors were watching. Then he girded his loins, so to speak, forced himself to ignore his erection from that point on, and went to work in earnest.

By the time the sun had climbed up toward noon, and the temperature had climbed up right along with it, Danny was finished with all the outside windows except for the ones in the back overlooking the pool.

He gathered together all his cleaning crap one last time, and dragged the ladder around the final corner of the house.

Then he stopped cold.

Behind the pool, in among the towering hibiscus plants that blossomed by the back fence, he saw a pair of legs sticking out along the ground. Little legs. They were wrapped in little ratty blue jeans, and the little feet sticking out the end of them were shod in little ratty tennis shoes.

Looking closer, Danny spotted another pair of legs a few feet over under
another
hibiscus plant, sprawled out in the
opposite
direction. They looked like book ends.

“Hey!” Danny bellowed, and all four legs jumped. Then all four legs wiggled into the shadows and disappeared.

A moment later, two young boys stepped sheepishly into the light, rattling the hibiscus blossoms and looking guilty as hell. They were the same boys Danny had seen arguing over the basketball in the driveway down the street two days earlier. They were also the same boys he had given the finger to after they ragged him about his pink plastic leg warmers that day they roared past on their skateboards.

Danny grinned when the two kids glanced at each other as if to say “Busted” then turned to face their fate. Danny bit back a chuckle. They looked like Danny was going to stand them up against the fence and call in the firing squad or something.

“You guys were going to sneak into the pool, weren’t you?” Danny said, trying to look stern but not really pulling it off very well. The kids looked so guilty, it was actually pretty funny. Still, neighborhood kids trying to take a swim in Danny’s dad’s pool was a common enough problem, and one Danny’s dad tried desperately to control. Nothing could wreck a guy’s standing in the community like letting someone’s kid drown in his backyard.

The two boys looked to be about eleven years old. One was black and the other was white, and they were both about as cute as they could be. Once they got a good look at Danny standing there with his cast and his ladder and his ankle monitor with the green light blinking over his right foot and the cleaning rags draped all over himself, they started looking a little less guilty and a little more defiant.

“What the hell are
you
supposed to be? A mummy?” the white kid asked.

“Yeah, man. What the hell are
you
supposed to be? A mummy?” the black kid echoed, and Danny watched as the two kids sort of giggled and snorted and nudged each other.

Danny propped the ladder against the side of the house to get it out of the way; then he dropped his cleaning supplies in the grass and tugged a dozen or so rags off of different parts of his body, glad to be rid of them. They were cramping his style. And probably
did
make him look like a mummy.

He tried to salvage his dignity by assuming the pose of a proper adult. Hands on hips, head cocked to the side. All that grown-up shit. Then he said, “I’m the guy who’s going to keep you from drowning in this swimming pool because nobody’s around to watch over your little asses when you sneak in for your sneaky little dip thinking you’re cool.”

“We weren’t going in your pool,” the black kid said.

“And we weren’t sneaking,” the white kid said.

Danny didn’t believe either one of them. “So what are you doing in my backyard, then?”

And suddenly the two boys glanced at each other all shifty-eyed, looking guilty again.

“Well?” Danny prodded. “Out with it. What the heck are you doing? And don’t tell me you weren’t being sneaky. Good lord, you look sneaky right now.”

From the other side of the back fence, just behind the two boys, Danny heard a car door slam. The kids obviously heard it too, because they both jumped about two feet into the air before whirling around to look behind themselves. Danny had never seen two kids look more startled in his life.

“It’s just a car door,” Danny said. “Nobody’s shooting at you, you know. Don’t be so nervous.”