Tell Me It's Real (7 page)

I opened the door, a little startled to see Sandy standing in the entryway. He eyed me warily. “You still mad?” he asked. “Because if you are, I brought you a breakfast burrito from Los Betos, which is your most favorite thing in the world.”

It was, but I wasn’t going to let him off that easy. I stared at him.

He sighed and went a bit further. “And I also brought
Transformers
on Blu-ray, because you don’t seem to own it for some reason.” He dangled it in front of me.

The man knew his way to forgiveness, especially through Michael Bay and burritos. I stood aside and let him through the door. He looked instantly relieved, and only then did I notice the bags under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept well. I wondered if it had to do with our fight, and I immediately felt like an ass. I placed a swift kiss on his cheek as he passed me by. I caught his small smile as I closed the door behind him.

“D
O
YOU
even want to know his name?” he asked me an hour later, tucked into my arms on the couch, lying with his head on my chest.

“Who?” I asked, watching as Optimus Prime kicked some major digital ass.

“The guy from last night.”

I took a deep breath and let it out, trying to remain calm. I paused the movie and the house got eerily quiet. “You talked to him?”

He shook his head, a little tense against me. “I asked around. Tried to get some info.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you, you big idiot,” he said softly. “More than anything in the world.”

Asshole. Going straight for the heart is so unfair. I just grunted at him, unable to use my words.

He took this as a go-ahead. “Apparently he’s from here. Went to the U of A before moving to Phoenix. Then he moved back here a couple of weeks ago.”

I shuddered. “Thank God he moved back. Do you think he still has his soul or did Phoenix steal it away?” There’s a strange rivalry between Tucson and Phoenix, one that probably goes back to the dawn of time when people from Phoenix crawled up out of the pits of hell and tried to destroy the paradise that was Tucson. It’s not something you’re supposed to question. If you live in one place, you automatically despise the other city. It’s a desert thing.

Sandy laughed quietly to himself. “He’s twenty-eight. Apparently not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s supposed to be sweet as all get-out, not to mention he looks as he does. Single, doesn’t appear to be too much of a slut. Couldn’t quite nail down his type, but I don’t think you’ll need to worry about twinks like Eric. Besides, even if you did, did you see his arms? I’d kick anyone’s ass for that. I think he could probably bench press a moose if asked.”

I snorted. “We’ll be sure to test that theory out,” I said before I could stop myself.

Sandy sat up, eyes wide, that familiar smirk forming. “Does that mean…?”

I blushed as I shook my head. “Doesn’t mean anything. I’ll probably never see him again.” I tried to ignore how my heart thumped a dance beat in my chest. And I didn’t want to know his name. Not at all. To hear it would make him real, and to make him real would make it hurt all the more because nothing would happen. I didn’t stand a chance in hell, especially with what all his friends looked like. I’m pretty sure you have to be a shallow jerk to look like they do. It’s part of the “I’m So Pretty” contract God makes all the beautiful people sign. I groaned as I realized I was going to ask anyway.

“What’s his name?” I asked, avoiding eye contact.

Sandy grinned and I saw a bit of Helena spark behind his eyes. And then, in a low and throaty purr, he spoke the name that would change everything. “Vincent Taylor,” he (or was it she?) said. “Goes by Vince.”

Vince Taylor
. “God,” I groaned, unable to stop myself. “That’s so fucking
hot
. It’s so not fair. The least he could do by looking the way he does is be named something horrible like Leslie Poofington or George Bush. God
hates
me.”

“It does sound very sexy,” Sandy agreed, laying his head back down on me, snuggling closer.

We stayed like that for a time, in the quiet, me rubbing his shoulders slowly, him humming softly to himself in that way he does when he’s content. Then something bugged me (as usual) and I had to ask. “Sandy?”

“Yes, baby doll?”

“How come you didn’t go talk to him?”

He turned his head, his chin on my chest, staring up at me with his pretty blue eyes. “Should I have?”

I thought for a moment and then shrugged.

He nodded. “I didn’t, because I knew that’d piss you off. And I don’t like it when you’re mad at me. Makes me feel all funny inside, and not in a good way. Ever since my parents… you know….” He sighed and looked away, biting his bottom lip.

I did know. His parents were killed in a car wreck when we were sixteen. I’ll never forget the look on his face when I was called into the principal’s office, the way he shook, his hand squeezing mine so hard that I had bruises for a week afterward. The look he’d given me was one of heartbreak, yes, but it was also of a boy who was completely lost. I promised myself right then and there (as I had over and over again for years) that I would always take care of him, for the rest of our days. And I liked to think I’d kept my promise, at least as best as I could.

“I know,” I said softly, rubbing his shoulder.

“There’s not so very many people I trust, and even fewer that I say I can trust completely,” he said. “But you’re number one, you always have been. And I push because I want everyone to see you as I do, this bright and shining star that would take their breath away. But I get scared one day I’m going to push too hard and you’ll leave me too. I don’t know where the line is and I don’t think I ever want to find out.”

“Hey,” I said, grabbing his chin, bringing his bright eyes to mine.

It’d be easy though, right?
my dad had said.

Maybe. Maybe not.

I leaned forward and he sighed, and his lips brushed mine and…

… we both burst out laughing.

Definitely not.

“No spark,” he said as he giggled.

“None whatsoever.” I laughed. “It’s like incest.”

“If only, right?”

I nodded, brushing his hair out of his face. “No one’s gonna love me as much as you do.”

He stopped laughing then, suddenly serious. “You just wait,” he said quietly. “I promise. You’ll see.” He kissed the tip of my nose and sank back down onto my chest. “Besides, we’re both bottoms. What would we have done? Bumped boy pussies?”

I groaned and rolled my eyes. “Shut up and watch the movie.”

And he did exactly that, right where he belonged.

Vince Taylor.

I sighed like a forlorn school girl waiting on her sparkling vampire boyfriend.

Oh sweat balls.

M
ONDAYS
suck.

“Mrs. Jackson,” I tried for the sixth time. “Mrs.
Jackson
.” I lowered the volume on my headset, waiting for Mrs. Jackson to finish.

“Do you know who I am?” she screamed into the phone. “Do you know who the fuck I am? You better do what I say!”

I bit back every single sarcastic remark I could have possibly said and took a deep breath. “Mrs. Jackson, this is the
tenth
time we’ve had this conversation. There is no coverage for your accident because you let your insurance policy lapse. When you don’t pay your insurance bill, you don’t have insurance.”

“Are you being condescending?” she shouted. “I know my
rights
. I am an American
citizen.
”

“I’m sure you are,” I said. “But I don’t know what that has to do with this conversation. You could be from Botswana and we’d still be having this conversation.”

“You better hope I never see you on the streets,” she growled. “Because if I did, I would
cut
you.”

Gee, another threat. “Mrs. Jackson,” I said, trying to keep the boredom out of my voice, “it seems I have to remind you
again
that these phone calls are monitored and we take threats very seriously.” Well, we didn’t, actually. I don’t think I know of anyone that has been murdered doing my job. Plus, she lived like three states away, so she would have had to take a bit of a road trip if she was going to really cut me.

“You gonna fix my car?” she snapped at me, ignoring me completely.

“No, ma’am. We can’t give you something you haven’t paid for.”

“You mother is a
whore
!” she screamed at me before she hung up.

“Yeesh,” I muttered, hanging up the phone and taking off my headset.

“What’d she threaten you with this time?” Sandy asked, looking over at me from his jail cell… er, cubicle, across the way.

“She’s going to cut me,” I sighed.

He grinned. “How wonderfully ghetto. You’re the only person I know of who works here that gets people to threaten you with physical violence.”

I rolled my eyes. “What can I say? The melodious sound of my voice obviously brings out the best in people. When are we going to quit and open up our surf shop?”

Sandy laughed. “Well, first we have to move to a place that has water. Then we have to learn how to surf. Then we need to learn how to operate a small business. Then we need to find the capital to open such a business. And
then
we can open our surf shop.”

“So… tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” he agreed. “But, on the bright side, it’s now 8:32 in the morning, and we only have eight hours until we get to leave.”

“So much time,” I moaned, banging my head on my desk. “This place is sucking out my soul. I should have been a romance novelist by now. Or, at the very least, had my own reality TV show where cameras follow me around as I get into all kinds of shenanigans.”

“What would your reality show be called?” Sandy asked.

“Paul’s Hour of Power.”

He grimaced. “That sounds like you’d spend your whole time getting fisted.”

I threw a paper clip at his head. It didn’t even make it halfway across the aisle. It was a good thing I never wanted to play baseball, because I threw like a girl. Who didn’t have arms.

“What time’s the new guy getting here?” Sandy asked, not even bothering to make fun of me for the paper clip.

“Nine. I don’t know why I have to be the one to show him how to do crap. He’s coming from the Phoenix office. It’s not like they do things differently up there in Hell.”

“Maybe he’ll be way hot,” Sandy said, waggling his eyebrows.

“Have you seen where we work? Knowing my luck, he’ll be straight, won’t have any teeth, and will spend the entire day telling me how pretty and perky he thinks his stepdaughter is.”

“Oh, Paul,” Sandy said sympathetically. “You are brain-damaged.”

“I love you too.”

I didn’t even notice the next twenty minutes going by. Time supposedly flies when you are having fun, but time also jumps around weirdly when you’re trapped in the limbo that is an office job. Some days, I’d look at the clock and be surprised about how quickly the time had passed. Other days, time slowed down so much that it moved backward and I could feel myself breaking piece by piece until I was nothing but a pile of corporate American sadness.

Paul’s Hour of Power
: speaking the truth, doing it fabulously.

So I wasn’t really paying attention when I heard my boss call my name. I said, “Yeah,” but I didn’t look up from my computer while I tried to pretend the new system that they’d made us start using weeks before made sense and wasn’t a train wreck like the rest of us knew it was (“This will make your jobs so much easier” turned out to be code for “We may not have known exactly what we were doing, but we put too much money into it, so you’ll kind of have to suck it up and work with it, even though it’s so broken that it makes your jobs ten times harder.” I thought about writing to the ACLU to complain and have them intervene, but then Sandy reminded me that it wasn’t civil rights related. We tried to think of a way to spin it that the new computer program was homophobic, but then we got distracted by the UPS guy, who happened to have a different kind of package we wanted to sign for, and the ACLU was forgotten. Cock tends to make things bearable).

So I was distracted. I kept getting a stupid error message on my screen, and I was about to chuck the keyboard across the room when I heard Sandy begin to choke. I looked over at him, ignoring the two people standing in front of me. Sandy’s eyes were bulging from his head as he stared up at our boss and the other dude. I frowned at him. “Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded as he started coughing, his face turning read. I didn’t know what the hell his problem was, but he didn’t seem to be dying, so I figured he was okay. I swiveled in my chair to face my boss and my nine o’clock distraction.

My boss, Chris, smiled at me. “All right. This is—”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I almost shouted.

Chris took a step back. “Pardon me?”

But I wasn’t even listening to him. He ceased to exist. All I was aware of was the sharp buzzing in my ears, how my palms became instantly sweaty. I knew I was turning red and I was fighting a losing battle to curl up in on myself. I knew when (
if
) I spoke next, my voice would be soft, so much so that my words would be unintelligible. My shyness and awkwardness were trying very,
very
hard to take over, and I was fighting against them in a losing battle.

Because, oh
because,
standing in front of me, dressed in expensive-looking slacks, a crisp white shirt adorned with a silk tie and suspenders (really?
Really
?
Suspenders
?), looking like he just walked out of a photo shoot for a magazine called
I Look Better Than Anyone Ever
, stood the man I’d spent the last two nights fantasizing about. Mr. Yes Please. Dimples, of course, on full display.

“Paul,” Vince Taylor said, his voice deep and looking inordinately pleased about
something
. “How nice to see you again.” He grinned at me like we shared a great big secret.