Winter Ball (3 page)

But Skipper wasn’t ready to talk about the night before, even to Carpenter.

“No girl,” he muttered. “Just Richie.” On the field, he was Scoggins. In person,
as
a person, he was Richie.

To Carpenter, who was a friend, he was Richie.

Odd how Skip had never thought of that before.

Carpenter smiled and paused, then pushed the Talk button on his phone. “Yes, ma’am. Did you turn it off? And then on. Yes, ma’am, reboot it. No, ma’am, I don’t know why it works, maybe it needs a nap. Thank you so much for calling tech support!” Then he looked up at his screen. “Ooh! I gotta chatterer here. Why aren’t
you
getting any calls?”

Skipper shrugged. Inside he was thinking that he usually walked his clients through consolidating their data, reinitializing their routers, and making sure they had compatible browsers. By the time Skipper was done with a caller, nothing on their computer would go wrong again,
ever
,
so he didn’t get a lot of repeat calls like Carpenter.

“I got no idea. Go, chatter.”

“Yeah, sure, but I’m glad your soccer buddy is coming—you guys talk geek. I need more geek talkers at the bowling thing. God, sports, why?”

Skipper didn’t have an answer—he wasn’t on the social committee—but he actually thought bowling wasn’t a bad idea. Of course, he didn’t have a bad back and swollen feet either—Carpenter probably wasn’t particularly comfortable bowling.

“I dunno, but feel free to talk
Halo
and
Titanfall
to your heart’s content.” Oop! There went his phone. “Tesko Tech Business Services, this is Skipper Keith, can I help you?”

He paused for a moment while a courteous,
educated
voice washed over him. Then he tried not to let his eyes bug out.

“No, sir, I’m not having one over on you. I didn’t even
know
there was a dog called a skipper-kee. How do you spell that?”

Seriously? He did something totally alien then and picked up a pen, making careful note of the letters as the person on the other end of the line spelled them out.

S-c-h-i-p-p-e-r-k-e.

“Skipper Kee. Huh. Who knew. Well, in my case, my soccer team calls me Skipper, but my first name is Christopher and my last name is, well, Keith. So not ‘key.’ So, you know. Not a schipperke.”

He had to ask the caller to repeat himself twice for the next part of the conversation.

And when he replied, Carpenter couldn’t stop laughing.

“NO!” CARPENTER
howled as the bowling balls crashed into pins all around them. “Richie, I shit you not! You should have heard him.”

Skipper groaned, and Carpenter held his fist to his ear, thumb and little finger extended, before he did a passable imitation of Skipper.

“No, sir. I can assure you that no part of this Skipper Keith is black and fuzzy and aggressive either. Yes, that probably is a shame. Did you have any computer needs you wanted me to take care of?”

Richie looked up at Skipper and howled with laughter, clapping and stomping like Carpenter was a regular comedian.

Well, it
did
make a pretty good story, and frankly, Skipper had been so worried about seeing Richie again that he was grateful that Carpenter had been so eager to share. He’d paced in the lobby of the bowling alley, not caring that he looked like a nervous boyfriend, and as soon as Richie broke through from the chilly outside to the overheated inside, Skipper relaxed for the first time that day.

As Richie had drawn near and filled out the paperwork, Skipper got a whiff of cigarette smoke, and he bumped Richie’s shoulder with his elbow and scowled. Richie had shrugged, staring at his receipt like it held the secrets of the universe.

“You know,” he mumbled. “Rob and Paul smoke, my folks smoke, I take my break with them—I was nerv—”

And then Carpenter interrupted, which had been a blessing. Skipper hadn’t wanted to have the “nervous” discussion with Richie when for the first time that day, Skipper
wasn’t
nervous, and a curse because, well…

The story ended quite uncomfortably.

“So
that’s
the best part?” Richie hooted, taking a swig of his beer.

“Nope!” Carpenter crowed. “The best part was this: ‘I’m sorry sir, but you’re not allowed to access porn from your work computer. No, sir. No, any porn, sir, not just gay porn.’” Carpenter grinned at Skipper, his broad, bearded face maniacal with glee. “No, sir, I think it would be a very bad idea if I came to your office and helped take down your firewall just for kicks.”

“No!” Richie sputtered, and Skipper shook his head at Carpenter, threatening dire consequences.

“No, seriously?” Richie was so excited he set his beer down and stood up, hopping on his toes while they waited for the fourth person in their game to finish botching his spare. “He totally hit on you? I mean, you guys all work in one building—that’s
insane
! What? Did he think you’d get there and start stripping like a Chippendales dancer?”

Skipper’s whole body twitched in horror. “In front of a
stranger
?” he squeaked, and then he saw Richie’s eyes on him, wide and mesmerized.

“I’m up!” Carpenter groaned, pushing himself to his feet with a sigh. He got his ball from the carousel as Wayans slunk back, dejected by the three-pin spare he’d missed.

Richie just kept looking at Skipper, lips slightly parted, hunger so transparent on his face that it was all Skipper could do not to just kiss him, taste him, tobacco and all, to answer that need.

“You’re thinking about it,” Skipper murmured under the sound of the balls and pins and the echoes of the alley.

“All night, I thought about it,” Richie replied. Carpenter’s whoop yanked them out of their own little world, and they stood up with Wayans to applaud Carpenter’s strike—something he’d never done before.

Their team placed somewhere in the middle, but everybody knew the best part was pizza and beer afterward, so nobody complained about the score. Tesko Tech was a big enough company that the IT department didn’t have to share team-building time with any of the actual execs, so everybody at the pizza parlor knew each other—and Richie, because plus-ones were welcome and Skip asked him to these things a lot.

So it wasn’t a date.

It was guys out with friends, cracking jokes and sharing work stories. Carpenter had a good one about the four-year-old who called because her mother had gone into the garage to do laundry and she thought that mommy had gone into the computer screen.

“How’d she know the number?” Richie asked, entranced.

“Apparently Mom had it taped to the computer screen—she’s sort of a frequent flyer.”

“Oh Lord,” Wayans muttered. He passed a hand the color of teak wood over his shaved head. “I’ve got this one woman—I swear, she sounds just like my mother. I almost asked her if she grew up in New Orleans too. But it’s like she’s read a manual—a
manual
I tell you—of all the dumb things to do with a computer. She actually called me up once and asked me how to disconnect a wireless mouse. It was insane.”

General laughter then—and of course one more person had a story.

But still, that didn’t stop Skipper from yearning for that first person to leave. Just one person, that was all it took. C’mon, someone have a kid, or a wife, or a—

“I gotta go,” Carpenter said, standing up resolutely and holding his hands out to ward off the evil pizza. “I’ve got a
WOW
event in fifteen minutes—Skip, you want to log on with me?”

Skip looked up, flattered, but shook his head. “Naw, Clay. I promised Richie a few games of
Titanfall
when we get back. Ready, Rich?”

Richie stood up, his movements so casual Skipper had to think that he, too, was quivering like a taut piano string.

Well, good. Every inch of Skipper’s skin—every
millimeter
—was tingling and tight. His groin ached like a bruise or an abscessed tooth, and it was all he could do not to adjust himself as he swung his leg over the bench, grabbed his jacket, and headed for the door.

Walking out of the Round Table and into the chilly October night felt like a fifty-yard walk of shame in his underwear, and Skipper
still
had a woody when he got to his car. He stuck his face up to the sky for a moment when they got there, and he thought he smelled wood smoke in the air.

“What?” Richie asked, parked, as usual, right next to him.

“Can you smell that? It’s gonna be Halloween on Sunday,” he said happily.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah!” For the first time since he’d walked into the bowling alley, Skipper could look at him and not think about kissing or rough, bony hands wrapped around his cock.

“Maybe we go buy some candy and decorations tomorrow, yeah?” Richie asked, sounding enthusiastic.

Skipper beamed at him. After his parents had split, his mom had sort of let holidays slide off the map. Skipper remembered a lot of Christmases where his present was money to run and buy takeout, and a lot of Halloweens where he had to turn off the lights and hide under the bed so nobody knew he was home without any candy. Since he’d gotten out of tech school, he’d been assembling, little by little, his own boxes of holiday trappings. Maybe tomorrow he could get something for the front porch of his little house.

And Richie would come with him.

“Absolutely.” Suddenly the evening ahead didn’t have quite the tang of dread in it—there was going to be a tomorrow in which they lost a soccer tournament game first, and then visited the Spirit store for decorations and the Sam’s Club for the two giant ten-pound bags of the really good candy. Whatever tonight brought, there was going to be a tomorrow with Richie. “Here, let’s get to my house—you can crash there tonight and we can go shopping after the game.”

A slow, gorgeous smile bloomed across Richie’s bony, plain face. “Good idea, Skip. I brought a few changes of clothes just in case….”

They both stopped and looked at each other. Just in case what? Just in case he crashed over? Just in case they spent the night together?

Just in case they repeated what they’d done the night before?

They stared at each other over Richie’s car, the silence between them breathless.

“See you at the house,” Skip croaked at last, and Richie nodded.

As Skip slid behind the wheel, he found himself wondering if Richie was going to take this opportunity to bail.

HE NEEDN’T
have worried.

Richie actually beat him to the house and was waiting on the porch with a gym bag over his shoulder. He looked around the neat little yard as Skip walked up.

“Nice fence—is that new?”

Skip smiled, pleased. “Yeah—got a kit from Lowe’s.”

Skip’s neighborhood had been mostly For Sale signs three years ago when he’d first bought his house. He’d felt bad—the street was lower-middle-class, and a lot of folks had needed to foreclose, but he couldn’t have waited. He and his mom had lived in an apartment, right up until she’d died, and he’d hated it. Hated not being able to paint the walls or determine what the outside would look like, or not even being able to buy his own overhead lights. When he’d been in high school, when he hadn’t been working, he’d been dreaming about what his “grown-up” home would look like.

His mom had died when he’d been in tech school, leaving a tiny bit of savings he hadn’t known about (and she probably hadn’t either, or it would have been used on scotch by then), and he’d been able to get a first-time buyer’s loan at a time when interest rates were at rock bottom.

He’d had his job for maybe three months before he’d started looking for a house he could afford.

What he’d ended up with was a tiny one-bedroom home in Carmichael, with a shitty heat and air system and a really vast backyard with a wooden patio actually built around an oak tree. It had taken him three years to get the backyard to a place where he was pretty sure it could keep a dog.

“Yeah,” he said, not able to keep the smile from his face. “I sort of thought… you know, getting myself a dog for Christmas this year.”

Richie stopped bouncing on his toes and frowned. “You give yourself Christmas presents?” he asked, like the thought had just occurred to him. Richie’s parents usually gave him gift certificates for Christmas—often to places like Lowe’s, because they wanted his help working on their house, since he rented the apartment over the garage.

“Who else is going to?” Skipper asked, genuinely puzzled. Men didn’t give presents. His office had a gift exchange every year—and he’d been scrupulous about participating too. Last year Carpenter had been his designated giver, and his gift had been a really big gift certificate to Carpenter’s favorite donut shop. Skipper had consoled himself with the knowledge that Carpenter
really
loved that donut shop, and the gift had been a true act of friendship.

Richie looked stricken. “Well, you know. This year… this year, I’ll get you something.”

That was sweet. “I’ll get you something too,” Skipper said, delighted, and turned to fumble with the key. “Careful—don’t want to let Hazel out.”

He pushed the door open and automatically stopped the entrance with his foot. Hazel, the fuzzy black cat that had sort of moved in when he started feeding her, snarled low in her throat and retreated. At first he’d wanted to let her be inside/outside, but the day after he let her out, he found her under the porch, meowing piteously, so very confused. He’d discovered that if he could keep her from escaping in the first place, she was usually content to lie low inside the house and sit on his lap during television time.

The front door opened straight into the living room, and he turned and plugged his phone into the charger that he kept there and put his keys in the bowl, making sure he left enough room for Richie to come in so he could set his stuff by the couch like he usually did.

The door shut behind him and he paused, hand over the bowl as he set his keys down. He heard the thump of Richie’s duffel bag in the corner, by the bookshelf, and was going to turn to see why when Richie plastered himself to Skipper’s back, his body throwing off heat like an overheating computer tower.