Authors: TJ Klune
“Er, let’s not go that far,” Sandy said, pulling me away from the mirror, lest I became betwixt by my reflection and started macking on the glass. “And don’t do that in front of Vince either.”
He pulled me into the bathroom and spritzed me three times with my cologne and was about to open his mouth to say something when the doorbell rang. Wheels starting barking like we were under attack, his little cart squeaking as he rode the ramp down my bed and tore into the hallway.
“Oh sweat balls,” I whispered, starting to panic
“Now’s not the time to freak out,” Sandy warned me. “Paul. Paul!”
“What if he realizes just how boring I am?” I said, ignoring him. “What if we’re sitting there, trying to have a conversation, and it just peters out into nothing because we can’t think of a single thing to say to each other? An awkward silence will fall where we’ll just look at each other and he’ll wonder just what the hell he was thinking asking me out on a date and then he’ll do the whole ‘Oh, sorry. Looks like my neighbor just texted me and my apartment was destroyed by a turbine that fell off a plane, so I need to take you home and, oh, by the way, I’m moving to Alaska tomorrow, so we won’t be able to see each other again.’ But
no
, because we
work
together, I’ll have to see him every
day
, and then that motherfucker
Tad
will be all like, ‘Oh, hey, Vince! I heard about that god-awful date you were forced to go on with Paul where he didn’t even wear sexy underwear and had jeans that made his ass look like a disco ball! I’m all tight and hot and perky, so you and I should go fuck on Paul’s desk and laugh at him while you put your dick up my butt.’ God, I hate Tad so fucking much, that stupid little whore!”
Then I realized I was talking to myself. I heard the front door open and Sandy exclaimed, “Vince!” quite loudly. “How lovely it is to see you again. How are you feeling? I certainly hope you haven’t gotten hit by any more cars!”
I ground my teeth together, planning intricate revenge plots that would end with Sandy framed for the murder of an English baroness.
“Hey, Sandy,” Vince said cheerfully, and my traitorous heart stumbled in my chest.
“You’ll have to bear with us a moment,” Sandy said loudly. “Paul’s in the bathroom talking to himself in the mirror about sexy underwear and plane turbines.”
“Plane turbines?” Vince asked, sounding adorably confused. “I have a lot of pairs of sexy underwear.”
Of course he did.
“He’s worried a turbine will fall on your apartment, the poor thing,” Sandy said, raising his voice even louder.
I gripped the countertop tightly, trying to remember that Sandy and I had been friends for more than twenty years and that someone somewhere would miss him if he was buried in the desert in an unmarked grave.
“I think I have renter’s insurance,” Vince said. “But I don’t know if that covers planes.”
“I’m sure it does,” Sandy said smoothly. “Paul? Oh, Paul? Are you done talking to yourself? You have a guest!”
You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.
If this were a movie, this would have been the point where some cheesy-ass song would play as I walked down the hallway into the living room. The music would swell, blaring something about kissing or loving or fucking or some other romantic bullshit, and then Vince would see me for the first time, a grin growing on his face, a hint of lust blooming in his eyes like fire, all because of me. I’d walk into the living room and all the rest would fade out around him and he would only have eyes for me. Sandy would disappear, my house would disappear, the
world
would disappear, and he’d breathe my name because I was the hottest thing he’d ever seen. And, of course, I
would
be the hottest thing he’d ever seen, and he wouldn’t even be able to remember a time he didn’t know me because I’d be his whole fucking world. The music would reach its screeching chorus and he’d step toward me and murmur, “Fuck the date, let’s just go to bed so I can do naughty things to your butt,” and then we’d live happily ever after.
The end.
Okay, but that’s not the end. Because that’s not what happened.
What happened was I was halfway down the hall when Wheels heard me coming and started yipping excitedly. After all, his three most favorite people in all the world were standing under the same roof for the first time ever and the
universe
needed to know about it! “Daddy!” he was barking at me as his claws scrabbled along the tile, his wheels squeaking. “Daddy! I’m coming to you because I’m so excited I could just
shit
!”
And me, of course, being wrapped in my own neurosis, didn’t see him until the last second, when he was right under the foot I was about to step down on. And as my foot fell and I heard his happy little bark, I could already see the headlines:
Gay Man Distracted By First Date Steps on Two-Legged Dog and Kills Him
and
Canine Lovers Everywhere Demand Dog Killer’s Testicles
and
The Christian Right Says, “This Is Why Gay People Are Evil; They Kill Handicapped Dogs To Satisfy Their Immoral Lust.”
So at the very last second, I launched my foot forward with a squawk, the heel of my foot sliding along the right wheel of his cart. Naturally, this made me lose my balance, and I went forward, stumbling to the end of the hall, then careening into the living room and smashing into the far wall. But it was okay! Instead of the obvious solution of stopping my forward momentum by pressing my hands against the wall, I took the extremely radical approach of stopping myself with my face. Into the wall.
Silence fell over the room.
Then: “Sandy?” I asked, my face still pressed against the wall. My nose and right cheek hurt like a son of a bitch, but I wasn’t bleeding. Not yet.
“Yes, Paul?” He sounded somewhat shocked, but like he was also trying very hard to keep from laughing, a breathless sound that reminded me why having a best friend was never a good thing.
“Will you do me a favor?”
“Yes, Paul.”
“Will you look up the nearest Taiwanese restaurant for me?”
“Of course, Paul. Can I ask why?”
“You may. I’d like to see if they would buy my dog.”
“Wheels, Paul? You want to sell your dog?”
“Yes, Sandy. To a Taiwanese restaurant. So they may cook him and serve him to a table of four. I may even give him up for free.”
“Table of four. Got it.”
“Sandy?”
“Yes, Paul?”
“Did you both see me trip and smash into the wall?”
“Yes, Paul.”
“Has Vince run screaming yet?”
“No, Paul.”
“Would you tell him it’s okay to do so now? I’d like to take the rest of the night to die of embarrassment and look up recipes for the Taiwanese restaurant. I’m thinking something with cayenne pepper. I feel it would complement the taste of mutt on the palate.”
I didn’t even hear Vince approach, didn’t even notice him until he was right up on me, pressing up against my back, putting his arms around my waist, holding me close. “You okay?” Vince murmured in my ear.
“Sure,” I said. “I just wanted to teach this wall a lesson by headbutting it. It’s always giving me dirty looks and I just got sick of it. Thought it was time to man up, you know?”
He chuckled near my ear, his lips
almost
on my skin. “Anything broken?”
“Aside from my pride? Nope. Nope. Everything else seems to be just peachy.”
“Why don’t you turn around and let me make sure?”
“I’d really rather not do that. I think it may be better if you leave and go to the U of A.”
“The college?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to see if you can find a physicist there and ask him how long it will be before time travel is invented. Because I
really
would like to travel back in time to when this house was being built so I could have stopped the builders from putting up a wall here, and then I would travel back to right now and instead of being face-planted against the wall, it would have looked like I was showing off some really sweet dance moves in a long hallway.”
Vince snorted in my ear, which I found to be rather gross, and yet was okay with him doing it anyway. He turned me around in his arms, and even though I tried to avoid looking at him, he wasn’t having any of it. He gripped my chin and forced me to look up, inspecting my nose and cheek. They throbbed a bit, and I felt my face heat up under his careful gaze. I was proud of the fact there were no tears in my eyes, even though such a facial smash deserved them. I was manly, after all, I reminded myself; manly men didn’t cry after getting tripped by their two-legged dog and running into a wall with their face.
Vince poked my cheek. “Ow!” I snapped at him.
He shrugged. “Doesn’t look like it’s broken. Nose, either. Probably will get a black eye, though.”
“Oh, thank you, Dr. Taylor,” I said, rolling my eyes.
He grinned at me, dimples exploding like fireworks. “Did you notice how I didn’t laugh, even though it was pretty funny?”
I glared at him and then heard a choking sound. I looked over to where Sandy stood in the middle of the living room. He had his hand over his mouth, squeezing tightly, tears streaming down his face as his body shook.
I stepped away from Vince and his hands fell to his sides. I pointed at Sandy, who I was pretty sure was going to burst at any moment. “You can go home now,” I scolded.
He nodded once and grabbed his keys off the coffee table. He almost made it completely out my door before he couldn’t hold it in anymore and starting howling with laughter, the sound ringing back to us as he closed the door.
“This can’t possibly be a good way to start things,” I muttered.
I Hate Waiters Named Santiago and I Really Hate YouTube
V
INCE
tried to say we could just stay in, but I told him that it was probably a good idea if we went out, given that I wanted to pretend Wheels was a soccer ball and I needed to score a basket. Vince then told me that it was a soccer
goal
and not a
basket
and that’s why those announcers always screamed, “
Goooooooaaaaaalllllll!
”
I cocked an eyebrow at him and he just rolled his eyes at me.
There was silence in the car that was almost uncomfortable, but I was distracted by the fact that my face was slightly throbbing. I wondered if I would actually get a black eye or not and if it would be believable if I told people in the office on Monday that it was from the fight I’d gotten in over the weekend, where I took on a gang on the south side with nothing but my fists.
“Don’t keep touching it,” Vince told me as he drove. “You’re going to make it worse if you keep poking your face.”
“I’m making sure I don’t have nerve damage,” I said, poking myself again, feeling the burn. “I may have smashed all my nerves to death, and I want to make sure I don’t get droopy-eye.”
“It’s going to bruise,” he warned.
“Maybe it’s my penance for hurting you. Like some kind of divine retribution for causing pain and misery and giving you two days off from work in a row where you did nothing but text me the whole time.”
“You liked it when I texted you,” he said, sure of himself.
“It was pretty annoying,” I said.
“Then why’d you keep responding?”
I poked my cheek instead of answering him. It hurt. A lot.
Instead of arguing with me further, he took my poking hand in his and held it, intertwining our fingers together, effectively shutting me up, an action I thought impossible. I suppose I could have used my other hand to poke my face, but it didn’t seem all that important anymore.
And since I wasn’t allowed to distract myself by poking my war wounds, I began to get nervous again, realizing not only was I
on
the date I’d been dreading/hoping for, but he was already holding my
hand
. This immediately caused me to start sweating, which made my hand clammy, and I was pretty sure that Vince was getting drenched, but he held on anyway, regardless of the fact that my body was leaking all over him, and not in the good way.
He took me down to Fourth Avenue, near where the gay bar was, and I let myself reminisce that this was where we’d first laid eyes on each other… six days prior. I rolled my eyes at my own mushiness, which hurt my cheek quite a bit. Then I started to sweat some more.
He parked near a little street café called Poco’s and asked if it was all right. I’d never been there before. It looked cute and I hadn’t heard any news stories of rats being found in the food, so I figured it would be okay. I didn’t share any of those thoughts, though. I just smiled widely and said this was one of my favorite places ever. I felt bad that I was building the beginning of our relationship on lies, but I figured it was just about a restaurant, so Jesus would forgive me. Then I got stuck on the word
relationship
and blanched at my audacity to think such a thing, which caused my hands to sweat even more. I’m pretty sure anyone walking by me would have thought I’d just climbed out of a pool. Luckily, Vince had dropped my hand by that point (probably to discreetly wipe his hand off on his shirt in disgust and to wish he had an industrial-sized bottle of hand sanitizer), so I didn’t have to worry about getting him any more wet then he already was.
We were seated almost immediately at a table near the sidewalk where we could see people walking by. Before I could open my mouth and find out exactly what would fall out, we were assaulted (yes, assaulted!) by what had to be the world’s most attractive waiter. He was all skinny and tall with eyelashes that looked like they had to be fake and eyes so green that you would have thought they were made of emeralds. His hair was dark and his skin was a lovely mocha color, like he bathed nude on a beach in the Dominican Republic, his lithe body and tawny muscles browned by the sun. He was wearing a red collared shirt, much like the one I wore, but he looked far better than I ever could. In a nutshell, he was fucking gorgeous, and I was dressed like a waiter at the café. Fan-fucking-tastic.