Love on Site (12 page)

I was startled as I turned around. Only then did I realize how late it was and that the site had cleared out. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” Walter said.

“I got so caught up in what I was doing I didn’t notice the time. But this is my last set of keys. I just have to write down the serial numbers and then I can get out of here. Do you need to lock up the trailer?”

“I can wait. Let me help you.”

I handed him the set of keys, and when our fingers brushed against each other, I felt that tingle again. Crap. It was almost worse knowing that Walter might be gay. At least if he was straight, I could lust after him without worrying that my dick would get me into trouble.

I leaned down over my laptop screen, and Walter read me the numbers. When I finished writing, Walter said, “We ought to talk. Can I buy you a beer or do you have to hurry back to the Beach?”

“Um, no, I mean, yes,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Yes, I can have a beer—no, I don’t have to rush home.”

“Excellent. How about we meet at El Rincón?”

“Oh yeah. Sure.”

“You go first. I’ll lock up the gate.”

My hands were shaking as I drove out of the site and around the corner to El Rincón. What if this was a date? I took a deep breath. I was being stupid. He was my boss, and he’d apologized twice now for being unprofessional, after our conversation in the men’s room and then after the kiss. We were just going out to have a beer.

I waited in the parking lot until he arrived. I hopped out and met him at the front door. We walked inside and up to the bar. “Hatuey?” he asked me.

“Sure.” He ordered two beers from the bartender, and handed one frosty-cold bottle to me. We sat at a table by the wall.

“I want you to know that I’ve been agonizing over what I’ve done to you,” he said when we were seated. “I’ve been a lousy boss.”

“I think you’ve been a great boss.”

He shook his head. “A great boss doesn’t make sexual overtures to an employee. Especially not one as young and inexperienced as you are. I promise you I won’t do anything else for as long as you work for me.”

“Then I quit.”

I didn’t know where that idea had come from, but I knew it was what I felt. “I’d rather explore the possibility of a relationship with you than have to work with you every day, knowing you were out of my reach.”

“Manny, Manny,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re so young.”

“I’m not that young, Walter. I’m ten years younger than you are. Big deal. And I’m old enough to recognize a spark between two guys when I see it and when I feel it.”

“We can’t,” he began. “I can’t. I have everything I own, and everything I’ve borrowed, staked on this project. You saw the way Camilo reacted to your being gay. If I come out to them too, and start dating you openly—everything could fall apart. And not just with them, with Dolores too.”

“She doesn’t know that you’re gay?” I asked. Immediately I worried I’d gone too far, and I held my breath. It was a big leap from one kiss to confronting Walter about his sexuality.

“No, she doesn’t. When we were first married, we had sex all the time. But things tailed off, because I realized I just wasn’t satisfied, that I was lying to her and to everybody else. She complained and tried a bunch of things—sexy lingerie and stuff—but none of it worked.”

He picked up his beer but didn’t drink. “Then one day a couple of months ago, I came home from work and caught her in bed with a guy she’d hired to do some faux painting around the house.”

“That must have been tough.”

“I was glad,” he said. “I thought that meant she was ready to call it quits, and I moved out. But she insisted that she had staged the whole thing—that she was just trying to make me jealous enough to come back to her. She got really angry that her strategy backfired, and we’ve been fighting ever since.”

He sipped his beer. “She even told her father, who gave me the seed money for this project, that it was my fault she cheated, that I wasn’t doing my duty by her.”

“How did he react?”

“At first he was on her side, until he discovered that she had brought the painter over to the site the other day, to see if I would give him work. I said no, of course. For one thing, who needs fancy faux painting at a warehouse? And there was no way I was going to pay this guy for sleeping with my wife, even if I didn’t want to sleep with her myself.”

“She probably wasn’t happy about that.”

“She’s pretty miserable,” he said. “And I feel bad that she is. But it’s all her own fault. After the painter fiasco, her father laid down the law to her. She’ll get the house, but we’re mortgaged to the hilt, so she’ll have to sell. And there’s no way I can pay her much alimony—I just don’t have the income right now. He told her that she’ll have to move back in with him and her mother and go back to work as a teacher, or else work in his office.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“But enough about my terrible life. Cheer me up, Manny. Tell me something about your fabulous single life on South Beach.”

So we were going to dance around the idea that we might have a relationship. I opted to keep things light. “Not so fabulous,” I said. “I work, I sleep, I go out to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner.” I scrambled for something amusing to say and remembered the conga line.

“When I mentioned that Camilo saw me on South Beach, I didn’t give you all the details,” I said. “I was out at a bar with my roommates, and we started talking to these drag queens.”

There was a glint in Walter’s eye.

“One of them was named Iona Trailer, and she was dressed like some white trash housewife—curlers in her hair, lots of makeup, fake boobs busting out of her dress. Her friend was a plus-size queen named Helen Wheels, and she wore this formfitting red satin outfit with matching red devil horns. And inline skates painted red with sparkles.”

“Just an ordinary night on Lincoln Road,” Walter said, smiling.

“Helen had the brilliant idea to organize a conga line down Lincoln Road. I guess we were all drunk enough to go along with her. She had this little boom box thing, and she started playing the Gloria Estefan song. She skated out the door of the bar with a whole line of us attached. I had my hands on Iona’s butt when we danced right past Camilo and his wife.”

Walter guffawed. “That must have been something to see. I’ll bet Camilo had a heart attack.”

I shook my head. “He didn’t say anything then. But that led up to the coffeepot incident.”

He drained the last of his beer. “I love that picture. That cheers me up.” He clanked his empty bottle against mine. “I should hit the road. Thanks, Manny.”

“Hold on,” I said. “We haven’t dealt with the giant pink elephant in the room. Am I going to quit, or are we going to…I don’t know…start something?”

“On-site, I can’t be anything more than your boss,” he said.

“But off-site?”

He hesitated. “My friend Pepe and I got our mortgage broker’s licenses a couple of years ago,” he said. “We were supposed to go together to a one-day license refresher in Naples this weekend. Pepe had to cancel, though, even though we’ve already prepaid for the course and the hotel, and it’s too late to get a refund.”

He looked at me. “Do you want to go to Naples with me this weekend? I’d have to sit for the class during the day on Saturday, but the rest of the time…”

“I’d love to,” I said. “I haven’t been over there since I was a kid.” I was floored at how quickly he’d shifted gears, from refusing a relationship to taking me away with him. “When do you want to leave?”

“I have the room for two nights,” he said. “Suppose we leave Friday after work, and come back Sunday.”

I drove back to South Beach with a gentle buzz—from the beer, but also from the intimacy I’d shared with Walter. That night I fell asleep dreaming of spending a long, sexy weekend with Walter, staying in bed, ordering room service, walking on the beach at sunset. It felt good.

Every Minute

Thursday I shifted to helping Adrian with his punch lists, a series of minor problems that had to be addressed before we could give any of the contractors their progress payments for finishing that building. We also had to have them taken care of before we could get our certificate of occupancy and release the building to tenants.

“First thing I want you to do is make sure the sprinkler lines are straight,” Adrian said, pointing up. “You sight down the line and make sure they’re all in line. Then you go around and make sure each one has an escutcheon—that little round plate that covers the hole in the ceiling.”

By the end of the day I had a crick in my neck from staring up, but I had verified that all the lines were straight and every head had an escutcheon. I drove back to the Beach, stretching my shoulders, trying to work out the sore muscles.

My roommates were in the living room when I walked in. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and settled down with them. Eventually I mentioned that I was going over to Naples for the weekend with one of the guys from work. “I thought everybody you worked with was straight?” Larry demanded.

“It’s not a sex thing,” I said. “He has to go to some continuing ed workshop, and he just wants somebody to come along to have dinner with and stuff.”

“Yeah, right,” Gavin said, but neither of them pressed me. They both had enough going on in their own lives, I guessed.

I told my parents that I was going to Naples—but with a couple of my frat brothers—and that I’d have to miss Sunday dinner. Papi told me to have fun, and I remembered what Beatriz had said—that I got off easier because I was the boy. I couldn’t imagine her taking off with friends for a weekend—even if she were my age and a college graduate. The leash wouldn’t be loosened until she was married and living with her husband—and even then, Mami and Papi could always reel her in, the way they did sometimes with Del.

After that, I had to decide what to take with me. Bathing suit, shorts, T-shirts—but would Walter and I go out to dinner Saturday night? I’d have to wear something nice, because I was sure he’d be dressed well for his seminar. I packed plenty of condoms and lube too. My dick was hard just thinking about Walter, but I resisted the urge to pound one out—I wanted to save everything I had for him.

Friday I checked that every electrical outlet had a faceplate. “I spent four years in college for this,” I grumbled late in the morning as I crouched down to inspect a wall.

“Yes, but you will only do this for a day, because you have that degree,” Adrian said from behind me. “The electricians over there will be doing this work until they can no longer bend down.”

“I guess you’re right.” I made a mark on my checklist and moved on. Every now and then I’d get distracted, thinking about my upcoming weekend with Walter, and have to force myself to concentrate. This was why he didn’t want a relationship with me, I thought. Because the job would suffer, and he’d fail as a result. Well, I couldn’t let that happen.

As soon as the contractors cleared out around three thirty, Walter came to my office. “Let’s close this place down. I already sent Estefani and the supers home.”

“So it’s just you and me?” I asked, standing up.

He held up his hand. “No, a couple of the guys are still out on-site. I want you to follow me over to my place. We can leave your car there, in my garage.”

As I followed him under the Palmetto Expressway and through a maze of suburban streets, I let myself daydream about our naughty weekend. We were going to have sex for the first time—and hopefully many times after that.

Walter paused and then turned right at a stop sign. I followed him.

I was in love with Walter Loredo. I hadn’t let myself feel that before, because I’d believed he was straight and unavailable. But now that both those complications were out of the way, I could give in to the rush of emotion. I felt like jumping out of the car and dancing in the street. Walter Loredo! My handsome, sexy boss. What I felt for him was more than just lust or hero worship. He was old enough to have the maturity I admired, but nowhere near my papi’s age.

He signaled and turned in to a townhouse complex. I followed as he pulled up in front of one, and the garage door opened. I drove inside carefully, grabbed my backpack, and walked to his car. “That’s all you have?” he asked as I tossed the pack in and slipped onto the plush leather seat.

“I travel light,” I said. I wanted to lean over and kiss him, but he had already hit the garage door remote and put the car in gear.

Within a few minutes we were on Tamiami Trail, heading west. My parents had taken us to Tampa a couple of times when we were kids, always out the Trail, which was the only good road through the Everglades then. The sun was setting ahead of us, and Walter and I had to put down our visors as we sped along.

I looked out at the sky, light blue, shading to navy behind the rafts of puffy cumulus clouds above. They were white and airy, though, not the dark kind heavy with rain, so I thought we’d have a beautiful weekend.

I suddenly felt awkward. What would we talk about for the two-hour drive? Work? We did that all the time. I hardly knew anything personal about him. “Where were you born?” I asked.

He turned to look at me. “Coral Gables Hospital,” he said. “Why?”

“I don’t know anything about you as a person,” I said. “I figured I’d start with where you were born.”

He laughed. “My parents came here from Cuba in 1980, during Mariel,” he said. “With my two older sisters. I was the first to be born an American citizen.”

“Probably spoiled, right?”

“You got it. I was the little prince. My whole family doted on me. Catholic school all the way, up through the Jesuits. Then UM.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You’re going way too fast. What were you like as a kid? Did you play sports?”

He shrugged. “Softball, soccer,” he said. “Like everybody. I had a bike I rode everywhere. We lived at the west end of Calle Ocho, almost to the Gables but not quite. I could almost feel my parents longing to make that move.”

“Did they?”

“Actually, they went to Broward instead,” he said. “Both my sisters live in Pembroke Pines, and they wanted to be near their grandkids.”

While I tried to think of what to ask next, Walter took the initiative. “Tell me about you now.”