Melting - Sean Ashcroft Page 0,2

nose. “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” he said. “I just need you to pick up a bed in town and move the old one out. I don’t think he’d appreciate having to sleep in his childhood single all summer.”

“His is the…”

“The room painted black, yeah,” Mr. Lewis said. “Maybe some paint, too. He’s had a hard enough time lately without being stuck in a cave. Let’s paint it white, take advantage of all the light it gets. He needs…”

“A break,” I said.

I didn’t know the details, but I knew he’d been through a bad breakup a little over a year ago. He’d been engaged to an older guy, some kind of writer or something who I half-remembered had cheated on him.

Asshole. Hookups were fine, but if you promised someone they were it, they should have been.

“More than a break, I think, but it’d be a start,” Mr. Lewis said. “He’s around your age. You two might… get along?”

I swallowed my next mouthful of coffee harder than I meant to.

What was he asking, here?

“It’s completely fine if you don’t, don’t worry,” Mr. Lewis said. “You’re my right-hand man and you don’t have to like my son to keep that position, I promise. I just… he could use a friend his own age. Marissa’s all he’s got, and she’s great, don’t get me wrong, but… he’s turning thirty and you could mistake him for forty-five. He lost five years to that asshole Aaron, but it’s more than that. Aaron made him feel like he wasn’t grown up enough when he was twenty-five, and now…”

Okay, he wasn’t asking me to sleep with his son.

Of course he wasn’t. Mr. Lewis would never have asked that.

It was everyone else who saw me as someone who could just be passed around, who was always up for it with whoever.

And whose fault is that? that same voice in the back of my head asked.

It was begging to be drowned in brunch mimosas. If I was heading into town anyway, maybe I could meet up with Seth. He was always there for avocado toast and day drinking.

… I probably shouldn’t have been day drinking today of all days, but the toast sounded good.

“I can take him out,” I volunteered belatedly. That was what Mr. Lewis was asking for, and he’d done enough for me that I could spend a couple of evenings with his son, even if we really didn’t get along.

“Show him around town, take him to the gay club maybe?”

Mr. Lewis laughed. “If you can convince Hayden to set foot in a gay club, I’ll…”

“You’ll what?” I prodded, smelling a wager. We made those sometimes—Mr. Lewis wasn’t the world’s strictest boss.

He actually treated me more like a son, and the reminder that he had a real flesh-and-blood one out there was weird.

Mr. Lewis’s eyes sparkled.

Could his son really be so different?

I’d seen a magazine profile of him once that called him the Ice King, but I assumed that had more to do with him being a pastry chef whose thing was ice cream than his actual personality. His dad was so warm and open, I couldn’t imagine Hayden as anything other than a younger version of the Mr. Lewis I knew and loved.

“I’ll need photographic evidence,” Mr. Lewis said, tapping his fingers against the side of his mug.

A serious wager, then.

“I can get it,” I said. How hard could it be to get one single gay man into a club full of other single gay men?

“Then I think I could let you borrow the car,” Mr. Lewis said with a smirk over the rim of his coffee mug.

“The car?” I asked, amazed at the prize on offer.

At the back of Mr. Lewis’s garage, under a tarp, was a cherry-red 1964 Buick Wildcat. He almost never drove it, sticking to the sensible little hybrid he used to get around town.

I’d driven it exactly once to take it for a yearly service, and that baby had purred under me the entire time. I wasn’t even really a car guy—my battered 90’s pickup proved that—but this car… this car was different.

“The car,” Mr. Lewis agreed. “The Buick. Twenty-four hours.”

Oh yeah. For a prize like that, I could absolutely get Hayden into a gay club.

2

Hayden

“So, how’d that date go?” Marissa asked, heels clicking on the laminate floor as she stopped by where I was sitting at the bar, hunched over a tub of ice cream and feeling sorry for myself.

“Well. He got an urgent call ten minutes in, excused